A friend at Micron has provided me with a Lexar JumpDrive Lightning to test out. I have to say that I’m pretty impressed with this USB drive. I had heard that the Lightning was really fast, but didn’t know what to think about that. Like many of you, I was of the opinion that a USB drive is pretty much a USB drive nowadays.
Head To Head To Head Contest
I decided to test that assumption by comparing the Lightning to the Sandisk Cruzer and Sony Micro Vault I own by getting some relative performance data. I recognize that the following tests are not scientific and I noticed a certain degree of variation from one trial to the next. That having been said, the results I’m presenting here were typical over several cycles.
To get a feel for how quickly you could write to these drives, I selected a folder on my PC that contained 107 files (for a total of 93.4 MB) and copied it to each drive. Below are the results of the test.
You can easily see that both the Lexar and Sandisk drives were significantly faster than the Sony drive. I expected this as I figured I was giving up performance for convenience with the smaller drive. I was surprised however that the Lightning was consistently about 15% faster than the Cruzer. The difference was quite noticeable and makes a significant difference if you copy larger files. I was pretty impressed.
Next I wanted to get a feel for how quickly these drives could read data. I copied the same 184 MB file from each drive onto the desktop of my PC. Here are the results:
Again, you can see that the Sony drive gets trounced, but that the Sandisk and Lexar drives are closer. After several cycles, I found that the Lexar drive repeatedly finished the move just less than a second faster than the Sandisk. Both represent very respectable performance and the difference would really only be perceptible if you were consistently copying very large files off the drives.
Puting 4 GB To Work
Shifting gears a bit, I wanted to put the 4 GB capacity of the Lightning drive to work. To do so, I wanted to load up MojoPac on the drive and give it a bit of a workout. I use MojoPac because it allows me to run a virtualized system on my work laptop with some of my personal data and customized environment without messing up my work system. It was pretty cool to see that after loading the MojoPac bits onto the drive, I still had a whole bunch of room to play:
I loaded Firefox and Visual Studio 2008 (only the VB bits) on the drive and still had 2.6 GB left over. I thought that was really cool and sure beats having to tether my iPod to my laptop to get the same environment (I suspect it would also use less battery power to use the flash drive instead of the iPod hard drive). The performance also seems faster with the flash drive as well (it “boots” almost 10 seconds faster).
Included Software
Lexar includes a utility called “PowerToGo” on the drive that’s similar to the U3 interface available on a number of other drives. It’s not as polished as U3, but does have some pretty nice tricks up it’s sleeve such as recognizing Microsoft Office on your system and adding it to the “All Programs” menu.
The Lightning drive has very little other software installed out of the box. One title is an application called “SecureII” installed that allows you to create encrypted partitions on the drive and shred files. The latter functionality works on files that are located on the drive or on your PC. The other title preinstalled is Evernote. There are a variety of other applications that can be added either through the online “Add-on Center” or by installing them yourself.
Conclusion
Overall, I’m impressed with the Lexar JumpDrive Lightning. It’s very fast and large enough to be very useful. Not everything was perfect as I’m not crazy about the mirrored finish – think HUGE fingerprint magnet! Other than that little gripe, I think it’s a great product and was glad to have the chance to play with it a bit. It’s definitely on my recommended list!
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