Today, we now have 32GB USB Flash Drives that go for a paltry AUD$95, and this is a review of Transcend’s offering.

I have to admit I’m a bit of sucker for Transcend. They make good products that perform well at a reasonable price, and I have bought several of their USB Flash Drive products over the last 5 years from 1GB through to 8GB. Sure, there are solutions that are much faster than Trancend, such as Corsair, but along with that comes a larger price tag. The Transcend product is competitively priced and performs more than acceptably to be used even as a boot device.

So today I obtained a 32GB stick. The package is simple – along with some catalogue advertising material, the stick itself is roughly 10mm x 50mm in size and is about 6mm deep, comes with a Transcend-branded lanyard, a removable thin clear plastic layer on the burgundy-coloured part of the stick to protect it from scratches and that’s pretty much it. The non-retractable USB connector is protected by a removable plastic cap. Refreshingly, the cardboard insert from the packaging actually makes reference to Linux as a supported platform, citing a requirement of kernel 2.4.2 or later.

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Like all sticks these days, this USB 2.0 unit is pre-formatted to FAT32 thus allowing it to work with pretty much every major platform out there. Personally I rarely use my sticks on Windows PC’s, though I keep an 8GB stick handy with FAT32 just in case. Most of the time, however, I reformat them to EXT2 or EXT3.

So, let’s plug this guy in. It’s always interesting to see how they implement the activity LED (well OK, it’s hardly anything to write home about, but I’ve got to generate some excitement somehow…!). Previous Transcend sticks had an obvious dot on the top, usually sporting a blue LED as has been the trend for the last few years, but this time they’ve gone different. There is no obvious hole on the stick for an activity light and upon connecting it to my PC’s front USB ports, the end of the stick suddenly lit up in bright roadwork-vest-orange. Well, that’s a welcome change. I can leave it plugged in a dark room without it becoming distracting! The LED remains on all the time to show that it is active and flashes HDD-style when there is activity.

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Nautilus popped up its usual “what do you want to do” prompt and I elected to open a window. As typical with most USB Flash Drives, this one came up imaginatively titled “disk” which is Ubuntu’s way of telling you that the stick has no actual label. The stick itself is completely empty – no promotional software or funky one-touch-backup applications are included.

First thing was first – relabel that stick. There’s nothing worse than having several USB Flash Drives and not knowing what’s on them at a glance. I fired up Ubuntu’s Partition Editor (GParted) and had a look at the stick. The stick’s actual storage space is 29.92GB and I observed that the leading 4MB were not allocated. Usually you find most Windows-formatted devices have the last few MB unallocatable, not that it actually matters.

Anyway, I quickly unmounted the stick and renamed it and remounted it. For those that are interested, this is what the dmesg output for it looks like:

usb 8-3: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 8
usb 8-3: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
scsi19 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
usb-storage: device found at 8
usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
usb-storage: device scan complete
scsi 19:0:0:0: Direct-Access     JetFlash Transcend 32GB   8.07 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2
sd 19:0:0:0: [sdf] 62750720 512-byte hardware sectors (32128 MB)
sd 19:0:0:0: [sdf] Write Protect is off
sd 19:0:0:0: [sdf] Mode Sense: 03 00 00 00
sd 19:0:0:0: [sdf] Assuming drive cache: write through
sd 19:0:0:0: [sdf] 62750720 512-byte hardware sectors (32128 MB)
sd 19:0:0:0: [sdf] Write Protect is off
sd 19:0:0:0: [sdf] Mode Sense: 03 00 00 00
sd 19:0:0:0: [sdf] Assuming drive cache: write through
 sdf: sdf1
sd 19:0:0:0: [sdf] Attached SCSI removable disk
sd 19:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg6 type 0

Exciting stuff.

With my now-properly-named stick, it was time to do some read/write tests. The stick comes preformatted as FAT32, so we’ll use that, but at the same time I will also conduct some tests using Linux-native filesystems. In this case, EXT3. Our test data will be a series of 15,645 thumbnail images, each averaging about 18K in size. We will also do a large file copy test using a compressed high-definition video file at 3.1GB in size. We will time how long it takes to copy this data to the USB Flash Drive and calculate the transfer speed from that. Then we will reboot the machine, to ensure no data is cached, and copy that data back from the USB stick to measure the read speed.

For comparison, we will also do the EXT3 tests with an older (6 month old) 8GB USB Flash Drive, also made by Transcend, to see if there has been a notable change in read or write speed between products.

First up, the small file copy test. Our test data is 15,645 thumbnail files from our host PC’s hard-drive, each averaging about 18K in size (total 281MB).

• Using the FAT32 filesystem on the 32GB stick, copying the small files took 12 minutes to copy at approximately 345K per second. Ouch – slow.
• Using the Ext3 filesystem on the 32GB stick, copying the same files took only 2 minutes and 53 seconds at a rate of approximately 1.6MB per second. Much better.
• And using the EXT3 filesystem on the older 8GB stick, copying the same data took only 2 minutes and 40 seconds, just edging out the 32GB stick.

Now for the large file copy test. Our test data is a single 3.1GB high-definition video file being copied from the host PC’s hard-drive.

• Using the FAT32 filesystem on the 32GB stick, copying the large file took a pathetic 69 minutes and 24 seconds to transfer, or about 780K per second. It really shows that FAT32 really does not like large files at all.
• Using the Ext3 filesystem on the 32GB stick, copying the same file took a far more respectable 6 minutes and 16 seconds to complete at approximately 8.4MB per second.
• Finally, the Ext3-formatted 8GB stick copied the file in 5 minutes and 55 seconds, which beats the 32GB stick, but only by about 20 seconds and half a megabyte per second (8.9MB/s).

To be fair, Windows’ NTFS filesystem should show reasonably similar figures to Ext3, but I did not test that as this article is about Ubuntu, not Windows!

Finally, we have the read-test. We rebooted the host PC to clear any cached data and copied only the 3.1GB large file from the USB stick to the host PC’s hard-drive.

• The FAT32-formatted 32GB stick copied the file in 3 minutes and 13 seconds. Exponentially faster than its write action.
• The EXT3-formatted 32GB stick took 2 minutes and 32 seconds to copy the file.
• The EXT3-formatted 8GB stick by comparison did the same copy in 3 minutes and four seconds. Interesting that it’s a slow reader compared to the 32Gb stick, but a slightly faster writer.

So transfer speeds have largely remained unchanged between generations, which is a Good Thing(TM) – if there is any faster speed, then that’s a bonus, but the last thing you want is greater capacity at a tragic expense of transfer speed, and whilst we do have that discrepancy here, it’s negligible at best.

Conclusion

Trancend’s 32GB USB Flash Drive is not the largest currently-available on the market, but it is certainly one of the most affordable and has good performance to boot. Aesthetically, the white plastic looks and feels a little cheap, but the stick as a whole feels robust and could probably take a few knocks without having a fit. The lanyard included is more than adequate to hang around your neck with, and the overall size of the stick means you could also comfortably add it to your keyring or hip pocket without it getting in the way, though the separate USB cap could probably be easily lost in that instance.

Review score: 8 out of 10

Title aside, this is one of yet another series of pre-packaged drive & enclosure solutions being bandied about the market today. These solutions are gaining interest with a lot of consumers because they generally manage to undercut the combined cost of buying the same hard-drive and enclosure separately, so much in fact that many users who only need the drive, buy the solution package, rip out the drive and discard the case because in some cases (pun not intended), it can be cheaper this way.

Cost aside, what if you simply need to have a cost-effective external portable backup solution with minimal hassles? That immediately calls for a notebook hard-drive that can be powered by the USB data cable.

A quick trip down to the weekly gatherings of some of my favourite vendors saw me come across Fujitsu’s answer to the masses – the intriguingly named Dynadisq III unit, available in several sizes. I am using the 320GB model for this review.

For AUD$130 you get:

• A single 320GB SATA 2.5″ notebook-sized hard-drive.
• Smart-looking matte silver enclosure with mini-USB, 5v external power and a small “Backup” button with some moderate styling and the Fujitsu logo embossed on top (the hard-drive is already pre-installed in the enclosure). The top side also features two LED’s – one green one for power and a red one for the obligatory activity notification. No blue LED’s in sight.
• A nice fake-leather pouch with a pocket and elastic strap to hold the drive, and several side pockets for cards and, er… stuff.
• A USB to mini-USB data lead.
• A USB to 5v-power lead.
• One-page “getting started” instructions (for Windows users only despite saying the unit will work on a “range of different computer operating systems”).
• A 50MB backup application installation CD-ROM (again, for Windows only).

The components come all packaged in a neatly presented and protected cardboard package.

The drive and case itself is lightweight and generally attractive to look at, with the fake leather pouch putting a bit of sophistication into the package, but then again, who buys an external hard-drive to be sophisticated?

Unfortunately, while the idea seems nice, the pouch just ain’t big enough to hold both the drive and cables together.

Plugging it in

Upon plugging it in to my Ubuntu Intrepid desktop, dmesg reported the following:

Nov  9 14:59:49 lamaar kernel: [ 1018.916011] usb 8-6: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 4
Nov  9 14:59:50 lamaar kernel: [ 1019.055454] usb 8-6: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
Nov  9 14:59:50 lamaar kernel: [ 1019.056230] scsi9 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
Nov  9 14:59:55 lamaar kernel: [ 1024.060657] scsi 9:0:0:0: Direct-Access     FUJITSU  DYNADISQ III     1.95 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2
Nov  9 14:59:55 lamaar kernel: [ 1024.062645] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdf] 625142445 512-byte hardware sectors (320073 MB)
Nov  9 14:59:55 lamaar kernel: [ 1024.063018] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdf] Write Protect is off
Nov  9 14:59:55 lamaar kernel: [ 1024.063640] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdf] 625142445 512-byte hardware sectors (320073 MB)
Nov  9 14:59:55 lamaar kernel: [ 1024.064017] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdf] Write Protect is off
Nov  9 14:59:55 lamaar kernel: [ 1024.064023]  sdf: sdf1
Nov  9 14:59:55 lamaar kernel: [ 1024.084377] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdf] Attached SCSI disk
Nov  9 14:59:55 lamaar kernel: [ 1024.084467] sd 9:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg6 type 0

So far so good, but not less than a few seconds later when GNOME tried to present the drive, the following dialog reared its ugly head:

Well, that confirms that it’s formatted for Windows out-of-the-box. Shame on Fujitsu for not properly unmounting the drive during factory testing! And what an exciting volume name they gave it too. Rather than shamelessly promote themselves, Fujitsu simply left it as the Windows-standard “New Volume”. Yay.

I was curious to find out if there was any included software on the drive itself. Maybe If I was lucky there would be random photos of factory workers testing the drives? Maybe I could find secret launch codes for Ballistic Nerf Missiles in the Southern Atlantic? Who knows what I could find?

I quickly fired up Virtualbox, setup the Fujitsu drive as a USB device for my Windows XP Virtual Machine and fired up. Upon checking the content of the drive, I was presented with… nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Totally empty. What a disappointment.

I did a proper disconnect on the drive and shut Windows down. I then fired up GParted to repartition the drive for Ext3.

GParted reports the drive as only containing 302GB of physical storage space, which follows the whole 1,000MB versus 1,024MB in a GB debate that always surrounds drive sizes.

Repartitioning the drive into a single giant 320GB partition took just over 3 minutes to complete.

Turtle or Hare?

So let’s try some real-world file read/write tests.

I decided to go with the following basic tests involving the copying of data:

1. Copy from my desktop hard-drive to RAM
2. Copy from my desktop hard-drive to my aging Samsung 160GB IDE external USB notebook HDD
3. Copy from my desktop hard-drive to the Fujitsu Dynadisq III 320GB SATA external USB notebook HDD

Timing was done by hand with a stop watch from the triggering of the copy action to the closing of the file transfer progress window.

First up, let’s copy a single 2.2GB DV video file.

Figure 1: Time to copy a single large file

According to GNOME’s Nautilus, RAM was pulling a transfer rate of 85.4MB/s, the Samsung drive was pulling 30.2MB/s and our review Fujitsu was pulling 40.5MB/s – a notable difference over the Samsung.

Next up, we copy 7,762 small files all between 10K and 25K each (total 146.9MB) comprised of various image thumbnails:

Figure 2: Time to copy a series of small files

Nautilus didn’t have much time to evaluate the speed. RAM took less than a second to complete the copy, my Samsung drive took 3.65 seconds, and the Fujitsu took a paltry 2.98 seconds.

Finally, we go and copy 2,987 medium-sized files comprised of digital photos in various subfolders all between 250K and 1.5MB in size (2 megapixels max resolution).

Figure 3: Time to copy a series of medium files

Nautilus reported RAM pulling a transfer speed of 71MB/s, my Samsung drive did 32MB/s and the Fujitsu triumphed over the Samsung with 39MB/s.

So the Fujitsu shows an average 21% performance benefit over my little Samsung IDE unit. Not bad.

The Backup Button

Earlier I pointed out that there was a “Backup” button on the back of the drive labelled simply “Backup”. The intended use is to perform a one-touch backup of all your important data onto the external unit. Sounds great, except that it doesn’t work. Well, at least under Ubuntu it doesn’t work. The system does not recognise any press of the button – not even as a keyboard multimedia button.

The supplied CD-ROM contains the driver and backup application for use with the Backup Button, but unfortunately, it’s Windows only.

This is hardly a concern, though. You can easily throw an icon on your desktop to execute a script to backup all your important data and Linux in general has unparalleled methods for regularly backing up large volumes of data with ease, such as rsync.

Aesthetics

So what more can be said about this drive? Well, it’s quiet – barely a chirp from it. It also gets a little warm, but not overly hot when doing large file copies. No biggies.

It certainly looks like a nice unit – clean design, not trying to overtly stand out. The power and activity LED’s are non-intrusive as well unlike the bright blue LED’s you find on some units.

Probably the only real downer I can say about it is the juice consumption, but this is probably unavoidable, really. The main reason I still like my little 160GB IDE unit is that it is one of the last capacities to not really require additional power. Whilst conducting my tests on the Fujitsu, I did encounter moments where the drive was reporting back to the system hard-errors and at one point simply unmounted itself. Disconnecting and reconnecting it fixed these issues and a quick run of fsck showed that there were not any actual errors on the drive. Once I had hooked up the second USB power lead, the problems never manifested themselves again.

Conclusion

One of the main reasons people use notebook USB drives for portable storage is for their convenience. Not only for their size, but for the fact that you can do data and power over one lead. This one requires two for any major file operations, and while that may be an inconvenience for some, it’s still a helluva lot better than having to hook up a power brick to run a 3.5″ desktop drive.

SSD’s (and to a lesser extent, USB flash drives) are still a long way off from completely replacing hard drives, and at this stage are far more expensive GB for GB, so until then, this little drive suffices nicely. It’s small, tidy, fairly quick, had a good pouch which will offer some knock protection, and while not as small as a USB flash drive, it easily fits into most pockets.

All up, this is a drive worthy of notice.

Review score: 8 out of 10

Many thanks to fellow Ubuntu compatriot Blinky who supplied the unit for review.