USB 3.0 FLASH DRIVES have been slow to appear in the market, with only a handful or so to have hit retail so far. Super Talent is one of the companies that have been at the forefront of pocket friendly USB 3.0 flash drives and its latest additions are set to stir things up. Much like hard drives and SSDs having a cache, Super Talent has added 32MB of DRAM as a cache on its new Express RAM Cache series of USB 3.0 flash drives.
The cache memory allows for a huge performance boost according to Super Talent, to both sequential and random writes. Read performance hasn’t generally been such a problem with flash drives, to the extra cache won’t offer any benefit to read performance. The press release claims that the DRAM cache system will “boost small block random performance by up to 300%.” That’s no small claim; although it goes on to say that the real world performance experience will be boosted by 110x rather than 10x of a regular USB 3.0 flash drive. Another part states that the new drives offer up to 260 percent faster write performance, although this relates to copying 40 unspecified MP3 files to a drive.
We’re curious as to why Super Talent hasn’t supplied any actual performance numbers and there are no performance numbers to be found on the product page either. The cache-less Express Drives on the other hand provides a helpful up to 125MB/s transfer speed figure, which most likely relates to read performance. The new Express RAM Cache drives also features a Turbo driver which is meant to boost the performance further.
Super Talent did at least supply MSRP pricing for its new drives where the 32GB Express RAM Cache drive will retail for $129, while the 64GB version comes in at a steep $209. The cache-less Express drives will cost $59 for 16GB and $99 for 32GB making the 32GB Express RAM Cache drive a small extra outlay for what should be a significant performance boost. The new drives are shipping now and should be available from retailers of Super Talent products.S|A
Lars-Göran Nilsson
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