Mushkin atom 64 GB Flash Drive Review

Conclusion

The Mushkin atom is definitely the drive to go for between the two, as 4 KB performance is unlikely to be an issue for most people. Unless you’re backing up thousands of plain text files or similar, you’re far more likely to be writing at least 32 KB at a time, which is where the Muskin shines. Add to that the very impressive read speeds and it’s a winning combo given that the Mushkin costs not much more than a typical USB 2.0 flash drive (if you can still find one).

Being so small, there isn’t much area to dissipate heat and you will find that the drive gets incredibly hot during use. On the flip side, it doesn’t have much mass either, so cools down quite quickly. Temperature didn’t seem to affect performance at all, with extended testing yielding the same performance after half an hour of solid reading and writing as it did when the drive was first plugged in.

Overall, unless you have a much larger budget for a flash drive, the Mushkin atom USB 3.0 flash drive is a good buy for the vast majority. If you are one of those that needs far greater speed and you have the budget for it, you can always look at an SSD-based flash drive such as the Mushkin Ventura.


High performance in most tests	Very poor 4KB write performance
Small enough to fit on a keyring without being intrusive	Plastic loop for keyring seems flimsy and might break after a while
Affordable	Very easy to lose if not attached to anything