Kingston Versus IronKey – Who Has The Fastest FIPS Flash Drive

TeraCopy

TeraCopy is a compact program designed to copy and move files at the
maximum possible speed and features a timer that works great for review
purposes as we can easily show you time differences between different
file transfer scenarios. TeraCopy also uses dynamically adjusted buffers
to reduce seek times and has asynchronous copy speeds for file transfer
between two physical hard drives. Let’s see what our group of 11 enterprise USB 2.0 Flash drives can do when moving around a 562MB file folder that contains many of the file types that business users or students would be using.

The very first test that we ran was to see how long it took to move
the 562MB file directory from the desktop to the USB Flash drive using the USB 2.0 header on our ASUS K53E notebook.

The next test we ran was to move the same directory back to the desktop from the USB Flash drive to take a look at the drives read performance.

Benchmark Results: These real world test results paint an interesting picture that wasn’t shown by running the CrystalDiskMark Synthetic benchmark. The IronKey D200 USB Flash Drive series uses MLC NAND Flash and as you can see writing the 562MB folder to these drives took nearly two times longer than any of the other drives tested. They also showed the slowest read speeds when trying to move data off the Flash drives. Moving up to the more expensive and faster rated IronKey S200 series we see significant performance improvements over the IronKey D200 series. The IronKey S200 series also showed slight performance gains as the capacity increased from 2GB to 4GB to 8GB, which was nice to see. The Kingston DataTraveler 4000 and DataTraveler Vault series both use MLC NAND Flash, but as you can see perform much faster than the IronKey D200 series that also uses MLC NAND Flash. It did shock us to see that Kingston’s MLC-based drives were on par with the IronKey S200 SLC-based drives.