Super Talent 16GB Pico Flash Drive Review

Benchmarking the Super Talent Pico 16GB

My personal flash drive of choice has been a 2GB OCZ Rally 2 for the last couple of years, which I originally bought for the speed it offered compared to other drives on the market. Physically, it’s by no means a big flash drive, but it dwarfs the Super Talent Pico.

In profile, you can see just how much smaller the Pico really is. Over the time I’ve been benchmarking this drive I’ve been half worried that I will put it down and lose it as it’s so small.

To test the performance of the Pico flash drive, we used SiSoftware SANDRA’s removable storage device tests. These were run on a decent desktop system (Asus P5Q3 Deluxe, Intel E8400, USB2.0, etc), so there will be no bottleneck from the system. The other drives used in the test were a 2GB OCZ Rally 2 and a promotional 2GB USB drive I had laying around from a Sapphire graphics card I bought recently.

In the 256kB test the Super Talent Pico 16GB is capable of just over 25MB/s read speed and 5.6MB/s write speed. Although faster than both the drives I tested against, the write speed of the Pico is about average with flash drives on the market now, but the read speed is definitely in the top end of the performance tables. Not bad for a drive so small.

With larger test files, all the drives in this test see a boost in their performance compared to before, at 10.7MB/s write speeds the Pico is now twice as fast at writes than the other two drives tested. The read speeds have jumped as well to nearly 31MB/s and the performance is amongst the fastest we have seen for a USB flash drive.