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There are several benchmark utilities out there to test your drive's performance. Not all benchmark utilities will come up with the same result, in fact, some read/write results differ in the tens of MBytes per second from other benchmark results!!

Before creating this page, I've searched for quite an amount of Benchmark Utilities out there, and basically spend an average of about 5 months investigating the different benchmark programs. Allthough there are many good programs out there, I foundPassMark's Performance Test the best benchmark utility available for me! I found this particular benchmarking tool (which runs under Windows XP&Vista) extremely helpfull because it's very customisable; and thus allowing you to come closer to real life benchmarks (unlike most other benchmarking tools).

Remember that the best benchmarking tool isn't the one that shows you the highest results, but the one that actually comes closest to reality!!!

I basically created it to help my search for an OS drive. See here for more info about that.

This page is not created to bring controversy between the different benchmark products out there. I partly used Passmark's Performance Test to show you the results of some of the benchmarks I've done with it, and hope this page will help you (once it's being processed a bit further) in selecting the best SSD replacement!

I also hope to discover which performance gains USB sticks generally will have over SD cards.

The Laptop itself is just an ordinary today laptop, with a rating of 3,8 on the Windows Vista Experience index, and the USB flashdrive used in the example could be any drive. I just used Transcend's JetFlash drive (feat. more products soon) because it's a cheap one, and because I had it laying arround.


* A Sony Vaio with Intel Core 2 Duo T5500
* 4Gb of SoDIMM RAM 800Mhz DDR2 (WinChip)
* Windows Vista + SP1 (Aero off)
* USB 2.2
* Toshiba MK1234 GSX 120GB HD
* Transcend Jetflash 2A 2GB USB flash stick
* Cowon D2
* Sandisk Micromate SDHC card reader used for measuring SD cards.
* Sandisk Extreme III SDHC 4GB
* Sandisk Standard SDHC 4GB
* TopRam SD card 8GB
* A-Data SDHC
* Dane Elec zMate Pen USB 4GB

All tests are 60 seconds tests, using a 1,9GB tempfile on the drive.

These different types of tests should give you a better view on the products you buy. You can be sure I'm planning on spending a few hundreds of dollars in the future; to further extend and update the tested performance list on the bottom of the page!

• Burst read test : The burst read test is basically a continuous read test. (See detailed settings below)
• Random read test : The Random read test is basically a random reading test. (See detailed settings below)
• Random write test : The Random write test is basically a random writing test. (See detailed settings below)
• Burst write test : The burst write test is basically a continuous writing for 60 seconds, like you find tech.specsheets online. (See detailed settings below)
• Stress test : The stress test is a 60seconds random read write test, to test it's ability to switch between the read/write command, and to test latency under bad situations. You often DONT find techn. specs similar to this online! (See detailed settings below)
• OS test : The OS test is basically a 60seconds random read write test, more optimized towards as if one is running a heavier OS (eg: XP/Vista)from this device. It's a much more accurate performance testing then the results ordinary benchmarks will give you(See detailed settings below)

• Burst read: 475MB filesize, 16384 bytes blocksize, Standard Win32 API Uncached, Synchronous, 100% Reading, 100% sequential
• Random read: 475MB filesize, 16384 bytes blocksize, Standard Win32 API Uncached, Synchronous, 100% Reading, 100% random
• Random write: 475MB filesize, 16384 bytes blocksize, Standard Win32 API Uncached, Synchronous, 100% Writing, 100% random
• Burst write: 475MB filesize, 16384 bytes blocksize, Standard Win32 API Uncached, Synchronous, 100% Writing, 100% Sequential
• Stress test: 475MB filesize, 512 bytes blocksize, Standard Win32 API Uncached, Synchronous, 50% Reading - 50 Writing, 100% random
• OS test: 475MB filesize, 16384 bytes blocksize, Standard Win32 API Uncached, Synchronous, 75% Read - 25% Write, 70% Sequencial 30% random

- WaR = Write after Read Latency
- WaW = Write after Write Latency
- RaW = Read after Write Latency
- RaR = Read after Read latency

note: The JetFlash A2 isn't compatible with Xandros, and thus not suited for replacement drive.

To install a second Harddrive inside, and you don't want to go for an expensive SSD, then best is to go for a high-speed USB stick, since the latencies on USB sticks are lower then on SDHC, even then on SD Extreme cards; this is due to the controller being on the same board as the memory, unlike on SD cards, where you'll need to install an additional controller.

In order to have a fairly good OS memory card/stick, you need to have an OS score of at least 5 to run windows XP/Vista quite comfortably. Smaller Linux distributions with graphical interface need a score of at least 2,5. However you could run a shell OS on any USB stick with a OS rating higher then 0,6 quite comfortably.

rio b and you sfr