A-Data C702 16GB Flash Drive Review

To determine a good quality flash drive, you have to look at both its read and write speeds.  Most drives don’t have a problem with fast read access, but can be painfully slow when writing; and write speed becomes critically important as the storage size increases.

We tested A-Data’s C702 drive with a decent sample of drives to get a feel for its performance level. We used several “consumer-level” drives and some “enthusiast-level” drives that tout dual-channel flash technology. We tested the drives with the ATTO drive benchmark, as well as HDbench.  Below is our test machine:

• Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 processor
• Asus P5W-DH Deluxe (Intel 975 chipset)
• Asus D2X PCI-E sound card
• 8GB OCZ DDR2-1024 memory
• XFX GeForce 8800GTS video card
• Windows Vista Ultimate (64-bit)

Because of the way flash technology works, drive performance increases with bigger blocks (writing a bunch of very small files will take a lot longer than the same size of 1 huge zip file).  ATTO’s benchmark is a good measure of how flash drives scale depending on the block of data being accessed.

	ATTO benchmark resutls MB zone ATV write ATV read C702 write C702 read PD17 write PD17 read Rally2 write Rally2 read 4 1932 8151 1046 5273 226 8192 4818 8171 8 3156 13033 1983 9596 457 12975 6942 13033 16 3485 18804 2288 16498 643 21478 8854 21759 32 11759 25709 5904 19431 1004 26214 20177 28572 64 13288 29114 10894 27005 11297 29498 24082 32498 128 13923 29114 11203 26897 11316 29498 24672 32736 256 13081 29114 11259 30229 11316 29498 24432 32498 512 13951 29117 11147 31068 11316 29498 24672 32816 1024 13421 29114 10618 31068 11316 29498 24582 32816

HDBench doesn’t give such a granular result as ATTO, but gives a better idea of “real-world” performance because it shows a single rating for read, write, and copy speeds.  This benchmark pretty much agreed with the results found with ATTO.

	HDBench benchmark results Drive Read Write File Copy OCZ ATV 27645 8119 2212 A-Data C702 26960 8080 2409 A-Data PD17 21104 6826 259 OCZ Rally2 Turbo 28116 20931 6046

While OCZ’s Rally 2 Turbo drive beat all of the others, it is also the only “enthusiast-level” drive in the group and has dual-channel technology.  OCZ’s ATV is a “consumer-level” device, but also supports dual-channel technology, and was only slightly faster than A-Data’s C702 drive (in write speed).  When it comes to read speed, the C702 was able to edge out the ATV.

You can analyze the chart all you want, but the big picture is that the C702 is in the middle of the road in terms of read and write performance, and is very good for its class.  If you need a higher-performing drive, then you need to step up to the enthisiast level devices (which tend to be alot more expensive).  Also keep in mind that your results may differ depending on your motherboard’s chipset, drivers, and OS, but at least these charts demonstrate how each drive performs when compared on equal footing.