Lexar JumpDrive Secure II 4GB

Testing

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The capacity graph on the side of the disc is actually pretty accurate and very easy to read. It makes those impulsive transfers that much easier, as you can instantly see how much space you have left, and whether you’ll have to mess around compressing/deleting files before you can add new content.

The graph is OS independent and is controlled by the USB drive itself. It doesn’t update real-time and seems to only occur after a file transfer has completed.

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As my motherboard has changed since the last time that I tested a USB drive, I’ll be retesting our other two USB drives to get a fair comparison.

I’ll be running our 900mb real world file test. This consists of loads of differently sized files totalling 900mb in size which should test the drives ability in a real-world. This gives us two results; read and write. Write is gained by simply copying the files to the USB disc, and the read is copying them back to the hard disc.

SiSoft Sandra XII was also used to get the operations per minute and endurance factor of the three freshly formatted USB discs. For those wondering, endurance factor is more interesting than it would first seem. Here is the quote from Sandra’s help file:

“Endurance Factor: is a figure representing the Wear and Life Expectancy of flash devices; this is obtained by dividing the average performance (normal condition, i.e. sequential write) to the lowest performance (high-stress condition, i.e. same block re-write).

It measures the relative improvement of endurance caused by the wear levelling or flash management algorithm; the absolute endurance of a device (i.e. its expected life-time) is directly dependent, in addition to this Endurance Factor, on the nominal manufacturer rating of maximum erase/reprogram cycles, which is typically 100,000+ for SLC and 10,000+ for MLC devices. (Higher is better, i.e. longer life-time for the device)”

What this means is that Sandra can give a comparable figure on how long a flash disc is suspected to last with continual use. A higher endurance factor will automatically mean that the disc is likely last longer than a drive with a lower endurance.

Italic results denotes the worst result, bold results are the highest.

As you can see from the above table, there appears to be a certain degree of trade-off between performance and endurance. For example, the Voyager GT is easily the fastest USB disc in the test and gets a mammoth combined index, while its endurance factor is a lot less. The Gizmo! is the odd one out (considering as its been in use for nearly a year) its endurance is less than normal. The Lexar JumpDrive on the other hand has a very reasonable combined index, although is a little weak on higher sized files. The endurance is second to none, giving the impression that this drive will last for a good deal of time.

Speaking of life span, this disc comes with a manufacturer warranty for 2 years which is nice to see.

In the real world tests, the Lexar begins to drop in performance, and these tests go to show that synthetic benching is not all its cracked up to be.

The JumpDrive’s speeds relate to 5.7mb/s write and 13.6mb/s read which is overshadowed by the Corsair which manages a whopping 17.6mb/s write and 22.5mb/s read. The difference is really noticeable especially when I had to copy the 900mb worth of files three times. Compared to waiting 50 secs, 3 minutes and 38 is a LONG time.

All of these drives come with their own security software which allows you to encrypt your files to prevent prying eyes from checking your spreadsheets and whatnot.

The JumpDrive’s software can only be run on the JumpDrive itself, and will complain if you try and use it elsewhere. This could be very annoying if you have backed up the vault’s contents onto your hard disc and have legitimate access rights to the information but for whatever reason you don’t have the JumpDrive to hand.

Depending on your preference, you can either encrypt a portion of the drive (or indeed all of it) or you can just encrypt a couple of files. Creating an encrypted portion takes about 3 minutes depending on the size and then receives its own drive letter. You’ll need to be an Administrator in order to use the encrypted portion mode as it requires mapping the drive. When you quit the application, the drive is unmounted from your system. When you restart the application, you have to select mount and then enter your password.

If you only want to encrypt one file, then the single file encryption is for you. Each file you choose uses its own password which means if you have several files that you want to encrypt, the portion method is a better idea (easier, quicker and you only have to remember one password).

Moving files from and to the mapped encrypted drive does the AES 256-bit encryption on the fly and adds considerable time to the transfer which isn’t great to begin with.

The other useful tool on the disc is the file shredder which works like every other and allows you to permanently delete a file from the disc. Information stored on a hard disc/flash disc is indexed at the start of the drive and when you delete a file, you only remove the index. This means that if you were to scan the disc with the right tools, you can easily undelete files. Shredding files simply writes a whole bunch of garbage information (or just 0’s or 1’s) over the top several times meaning that even if you were to scan the disc, you wouldn’t find the deleted file.

Vista has a new feature which allows for certain files to be cached onto a USB disc to speed up loading of certain applications. It was toted as extending your system RAM, but USB drives are slower at sustained read/write than a HDD, but the random access time is near instantaneous. This disc isn’t certified that it’ll run ReadyBoost and whether that matters remains up for debate (who pays for a fast USB disc to just stick in the back of your PC?). The higher end JumpDrive Mercury however is ReadyBoost ready.

Storage