Review of Memonex Race R310 16GB USB Drive

USB drives aren’t exactly an exciting product to review, but they’re something that probably everyone has and most people use everyday. They’re one of those little gadgets that people just take for granted anymore really, but there is a difference between them in terms of build quality and performance. Those two things are very important really, the build quality must be very good as most people just toss them in their pocket with everything, and of course they should be good performing since no body wants to wait for stuff to transfer.

Today for review I’ve got the Race R310 16gb USB drive from a company called Memonex, I never heard of them, but they emailed me and asked me to review their products, being curious I said sure. The drive itself is aluminum and plastic so it’s well well, but I found that it performs very well, above the specs that Memonex even cited for it. It’s probably one of the fastest drives out there today, at least faster than those I’ve compared it to anyway, and they’re form companies like Sandisk, Verbatim and PNY. So read on to check out a fast little USB drive…

Info:

Race R310

This product is a gift from Memonex Technology experts and engineers to professional users who hate “Waiting…”! Speed is the first important specification in this product. The good looking body of this Flash memory is designed by combining high quality plastic and aluminum together. Just a quick look at Memonex R310 is enough for experts to choose it as a high-class product.

Specs:
*Dimensions?59.6mm X 20.8mm X 9.4mm
*Weight?15g
*Interface : Universal Serial Bus 1.1 & 2.0 compatible (USB)
*Durability?10,000 insertions (minimum)
*Support OS: Windows Vista, Windows 98, Windows 2000, Win ME, Win XP, Mac OS 9.0 & higher, Linux 2.4.0
*Read speed: 30MB, Write speed: 25MB

What’ in the Box?

The Race R310 USB Drive comes in the sealed plastic clamshell style package.

The drive itself is aluminum and plastic, it does feel very well made. The Aluminum is a gray in color and it’s very shiny or glossy.

On the very end you’ll find  a place to attach a lanyard or key ring.

The lid comes off to reveal the USB connector.

The lid doesn’t fit onto the back of the drive, so you’ll have to be careful not to lose it.

 

Usage:

When powered on there’s  blue LED inside the back end of the drive. Really though you can’t even see it unless you’re looking for it, I just noticed it by accident.

For comparison to the Race R310 drives I’ve got three other 16gb USB drives:

Verbatim Store ‘n’ Go 16 GB
SanDisk Cruzer Micro 16 GB
PNY Attache 16 GB USB

 

I ran two different tests to see how these drives compared to each other.

The first test is ATTO Disk benchmark:

As you can clearly see the Memonex drive is the fastest of the bunch in both read and write tests.

Memonex claims the Race R310 should get 30mb read speeds and 25mb write speeds, and got more than that actually. I max out at 34mb read and 27mb for write, not bad at all.

The next test I ran was SiSoft Sandra 2010 Removable Storage Benchmark.

Here’s some info about the test:

Removable Storage

Benchmark removable and flash devices.

Combined Device Index: is a composite figure representing an overall performance rating based on the average of the Combined Index figures over the four file sizes. (Higher is better, i.e. better performance)

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 leveling 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)

and here’s the test results:

As you can see the Race R310 is a nice fast drive.

Conclusion:

So, as you can see the Race R310 is a very fast drive, even faster than Memonex claims it should be, that of course is a good thing as nobody likes to wait.

The build quality is very good, the aluminum and plastic combination should withstand the rigors or daily life with no problems.

It would be nice if they included a lanyard or keychain attachment though, and personally I don’t like USB drives where you can’t attach the cap to the back of them. I don’t know about you but I’m prone to lose things, and having a USB cap just lying around to an accident waiting to happen for me.

PROS	CONS
+Very fast, performs above specs +Looks nice +Seems well made	-No Lanyard or key loop included -Nowhere ot put the cap