ADATA N005 Pro USB flash drive review - Final words and conclusion

Final words and conclusion

The ADATA N005 Pro USB Flash Drive is a notable USB stick alright. Nothing about it is complicated, pop it into a USB 3.0 host and you are good to go.

Like any traditional USB Flash disk, write performance will be severely limited when you are dealing with lots and lots of small files. But is that the actual workload intended for a USB disk? You surely are not using it say as an SSD. So we don't think so, it's with MP3 files, movies, zip-files, ISO and pretty much large files where a stick like this shows it's muscle. Writing lots and lots of small files however can be dreadful.

USB flash disks seem to get wider and wider in size, and that's impractical as often they do not fit into the USB port anymore. It was great to see ADATA offer such a slim USB 3.0 unit, you'll have no issues whatsoever using it / physically inserting it into the client port.

The N005 Pro controller can address four channels of NAND simultaneously, that design combined with the performance that USB 3.0 has to offer will then show us the advertised speeds of 80~90 MB/sec write performance and even 180 MB/sec READ performance. There are other units out there that are eight-channel based like Patriot's SuperSonic Magnum, however they will be much more expensive.

Additional tests showed that copying a database backup of roughly 450MB (GZip)  towards the storage device took roughly 4 seconds, copying it back to the RAMDisk .. less then 2 seconds. Copying a DVD ISO towards thee stick takes just under 50 seconds.

It's stuff like that that brings a smile to my face as anno 2011 we do not like to wait on a PC copying files right?

The ADATA N005 Pro matches its advertised read and write rates in our sequential performance benchmarks but as stated it will be slower with small write files, small file I/O operations remain a bottleneck, but this is a USB flash disk. 

Keep in mind if you can’t find a USB 3.0 port, it will work just fine at USB 2.0 port with respective speeds. At roughly 100 EUR the storage device surely is not cheap, but if money is not the issue then we can wholeheartedly recommend the product and having 64Gb in your hands so portable, well that's just a great thing..

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