Speed on the PC

Before we get to how the drives perform on the Xbox, first we'll look at how they perform on the PC using two test sets: 1,994 small documents totalling 430MB; and one large file totalling 2.79GB. We've conducted read and write tests for both.

Small files read speeds shows very little variance, despite the large theoretical difference between each drive.

Writing, which always takes longer, shows the Corsair's greater speed. Its comfortably faster than both the SanDisk and Kingston drives, while the Verbatim drive lags far behind.

Switching to our large file test, which ought to deliver much faster results, the Corsair shows its superior speed. It ticks over at a massive 33.1MB/s, though the Kingston manages an impressive 30.9MB/s that best the evenly matched SanDisk and Verbatim drives. This is quite a bit more than Kingston's quoted speed of 20MB/s, though we've run all tests four times - discounting the least representative result - to produce an average result.

Things change a little in the write test, however. Unsurprisingly the Corsair is out in front again, running an impressive 23.6MB/s - a comfortable margin over the SanDisk drive, which manages 18MB/s. Unlike the read test the SanDisk beats Kingston's effort, while the Verbatim shows exactly why it's cheaper than the rest with a truly dreadful result.

From our PC testing we can see that the Corsair is, as we'd expected, much the fastest drive - particularly where writing is concerned, though it's read speeds are fast as well. Both the SanDisk and Kingston drives seem well-matched, and though the Verbatim has dreadful write speeds, its read speeds aren't bad at all.