Sharkoon Flexi-Drive Extreme Duo 16GB USB 3.0 Thumb Drive Review

After being underwhelmed by the Mach Xtreme MX-GX last week, we are moving onto the new Sharkoon Flexi-Drive Extreme Duo USB 3.0. Personally, I haven't seen too many Sharkoon products, but the company has a solid reputation. Their product line up spans several categories, but storage components and flash products seem to be their speciality.

Sharkoon currently has four flash based portable storage drives with two using the USB 3.0 interface. The Flexi-Drive Extreme Duo that we are looking at today is the flagship.

The Sharkoon Flexi-Drive Extreme Duo has the typical cheesy name that comes along with most thumb drives, but this one doesn't follow the traditional paths. To start things off, this USB 3.0 drive uses Single-Level Cell (SLC) flash, the same flash found on enterprise SSDs. The SLC flash gives the Flexi-Drive Extreme Duo the ability to read and write data at the same speed, 130MB/s.

Most of the drives hitting our labs these days have comparable read speed, but their write speeds are nowhere near that of the Extreme Duo. By using synchronized flash, Sharkoon was able to deliver a high speed flash drive with balanced read / write performance.

The Flexi-Drive Extreme Duo is available in two capacity sizes of 16 and 32GB.We've had the 16GB drive in our lab for a couple of weeks now, but I'm still not able to find the drive available in the US. Sharkoon has some products available at Newegg, but not the Extreme Duo.

Using ATTO as my initial test, I achieved read and write speeds in excess of 130MB/s. The performance ramped up quickly and the drive showed good speeds all the way down to the 8K block size.

The write latency seemed to be the only weak point on the Extreme Duo. Here we see the drive with an average latency of 451ms. On an SSD this would be an indication of a poor level of performance, but when transferring data to a flash drive it's about on average for what we are seeing from other products.

The speed would make it difficult to run intense programs from the flash drive, though. As long as you are just planning on using the drive for storage and data transfers, you'll be fine.

In CrystalDiskMark we are looking at the 4K performance. USB 3.0 doesn't support native command queuing, so the queue depth tests are meaningless. Here we see the Extreme Duo delivering over 12MB/s read at 4K, but the writes were just over .5MB/s.

AS SSD Copy Benchmark was used to determine the real world file transfer speed of the thumb drives. Three tests are ran; ISO, Program and Game. The ISO file is a large file, Program is a series of small files and Game is a mix of several large and small files.

The ISO test went by very quickly, just 16 seconds and at an average speed of 67MB/s. Large file transfers are not going to be a problem with the Sharkoon Flexi-Drive Extreme Duo.

The Program test that uses several smaller files took quite a bit longer due to the 4K write performance. This test took just under 80 seconds and had an average speed of 18MB/s.

The Game test which uses a mix of large and small files went better than the program test. The Game test rook just 37 seconds and had an average speed of 37MB/s.

Sharkoon's press release stated the 16GB Flexi-Drive Extreme Duo is capable of handling over 100,000 writes per cell due to the SLC flash used. This is much higher than what you'd get with a MLC drive.

The press release also states that the 16GB model that we looked at today has an MSRP of around 50 EUROs. The price is very good for the performance, technology and longevity that you are getting with the Sharkoon Flexi-Drive Extreme Duo. This is a flash drive that you will be able to use for several years even with heavy use.

... Read the rest in your browser!

Mach Xtreme MX-GX USB 3.0 16GB Thumb Drive Review

It's been awhile since we looked at a thumb drive, but it's time to get back into the thick of things. Over the coming days we'll see three of the latest and greatest USB 3.0 thumb drives that are capable of holding large amounts of data and transferring that data at high speeds. The last drive we looked at was the Mach Xtreme MX-FX; today we are looking at Mach Xtreme's newest offering, the MX-GX.

The Mach Xtreme GX is available in four capacity sizes; 8GB, 16GB, 32GB and 64GB. Each capacity size has a different read / write speed rating even though they all use a quad channel controller. Today we are looking at the 16GB model that is capable of 140MB/s read and 30MB/s write speeds.

After a few minutes of searching, I was able to find the Mach Xtreme MX-GX 16GB online for 49.99 USD at Amazon.com. This price falls in line with other 16GB USB 3.0 drives with similar read / write speeds. Google only reported one hit, though, on our product search, so there aren't too many of them floating around on this side of the pond.

Our initial testing with ATTO gave us a read speed of nearly 100MB/s and a write speed of around 20MB/s. These results were recorded without using Mach Xtreme's add-on software layer that is designed to improve transfer speeds. With the software installed we saw a performance gain, but I'm still not sold on end users installing a software package on each of their systems just for flash drives. Motherboard manufacturers are adding a 'Turbo USB 3" feature in the BIOS that gets around the software layer, but so far we've only achieved limited success.

As you'll see at the top of the next column, in CrystalDiskMark we found that the Mach Xtreme MX-GX performed very well when reading data, but the write performance was around the same speed as a good USB 2.0 flash drive. Depending on how you use the MX-GX, this could be an issue.

If you plan to put a large amount of data on the drive and then use the Mach Xtreme MX-GX to read that data on different computers, then you will be fine; it'll just take longer to put that data on the first time. If you plan on using the MX-GX as temporary storage that is constantly revolving data, then you will have to wait on the write process more often. At just 30MB/s write speed you will be waiting around quite a bit for large files.

If that isn't bad enough, the 4K write speed is only .01MB/s; you will be waiting around for small file transfers as well. Let's take a look at how the synthetic numbers relate to real world performance.

AS SSD Copy Benchmark was used to determine the real world file transfer speed of the thumb drives. Three tests are ran; ISO, Program and Game. The ISO file is a large file, Program is a series of small files and Game is a mix of several large and small files.

The real world file transfer speed of the Mach Xtreme MX-GX isn't that great. Actually....we've tested USB 2.0 drives that were faster.

The MX-GX wasn't without issue either. The software package caused all sorts of trouble when we plugged the drive into a USB 2.0 port and the drive went half crazy when tested with AIDA64 (the latency tests). I wouldn't suggest anyone test this flash drive with AIDA64. You can add AS SSD's standard test as well. Since the 4K write speed is so slow, the test takes forever. We stopped the 4K write test after 18 hours.

No one likes to be a spoil sport, but the Mach Xtreme MX-GX just didn't do it for me. The testing issues turned me off from the drive right at the start, but the real world performance when trying to transfer files was the final straw. The last chance was transferring data off a Lenovo W701ds (with USB 3.0) and the data writes just took forever. I eventually just pulled the HDD and transferred the data over SATA.

... Read the rest in your browser!