What I can tell you is that not all of these can go through the extreme situations or circumstances that I will outline… I never tested all the devices mentioned above…

I selected various devices to see how rough of physical circumstances could be done and still have a working drive that would work and retrieve data.

Sticks are used for school… they can often end up in the napsack, and get soggy… or they can also be left in a pair of jeans, and end up down in the bottom of the washer…

The result… well that depends… maby it can be like your cellphone… maby your lucky and dry it all out good, and it still works.. Maby it does not…

I had to select to use various products, for my own personal use, and in many situations I need something that is going to work for me regardless of the situation or circumstances.. obviously a good backup, is a solution to everything…

What I found was that some SD cards are basically waterproof.. same holds true to MOST microSD cards… But not Sticks in general…

The Best ‘Stick’ that i could find was the Verbatim Tough N Tidy… In relation to the Physical Aspects… I spoke to someone at Verbatim before I bought one, and was doing some dev and had to choose a device for the task required..

When I told him what I do with my MicroSD cards, and told him what I was going to do with the Verbatim product, he did not really know what to say…

First the device was loaded with data… which is typical, and could be later tested for signs of failure…

the device was water tested… Tested and verified..
Then the device was Frozen in water and made a popsicle in a cup with one..
Melted from a Block of ice… Wiped off, and Tested…
Perfect Operation…

Then for the next test…

It was boiled on top of the stove in a pot of water…
The pot was boiling Dry…

The chip was removed from the water… and let stand to cool… it was too hot to touch with the bare hands from a Boiling pot of water.

it was then wiped off… still very warm… and then tested…

Tested and seems to be working 100%
various data tests ect preformed.. All perfectly fine..

The device was again Wiped, Reloaded, Wiped Reloaded… ect…

No Problems what so ever…

thats my personal expierence, and I test all products that i use to do a job very through. Including accidental issues such as described above…
Stuff happens… and it will most likely happen to you… Soggy Napsacks, Forgotten Laundry your wife put in the washer while you were sleeping in on saturday.. Cars caught in Floods on the way to work.. Anything is possible…

within reason…

I think freezing chips, and unthawing them is a bit extreme…
So is boiling them in a boiling pot of water on the stove.

of everything thats out there, sure some stuff is nice and cheap and also fast..

Verbatim Tough M Tidy is what you wana use.

My stuff is Industrial applications as well as also Marine Applications.

My stuff works… does yours??

To get rid of this cluster size problem, you should use a test of *raw* read/write speeds directly to the device (i.e. block read/write). Also give model numbers.

If you want to compare ‘real world’ file read/write times, format them all using the same program or utility first.

Also, the flash write speed depends on whether the flash memory is ‘clean’ (all FFs) or not. To write to flash memory, the controller needs to read a block of flash memory, alter the sectors that you want to change, and then write the whole block back again. If however the block of memory is ‘clean’ (as with a brand new stick) then all the controller does is simply write the new data to the stick (no read cycle first).

As there is no easy way to ‘clean’ a stick. You should fill up all sticks with 16GB of data first. This makes sure that all the memory is marked as ‘dirty’ before you benchmark.

This may explain the varying results?

@samiz ,
how the heck do you get 39 MB/sec transfer speed from USB 2.0? USB 2.0 is capped around 30MB/sec. I don’t think the test you did is correct.

I’m guessing the Sandisk was much better than the other with small file sizes, but worse with large file sizes. All the specific results given above are for large medium and large files. For Sandisk to have a better average speed, it must have really whipped through the small ones