Mach Xtreme MX-GX USB 3.0 16GB Flash Drive Review

PerformanceFor testing a drive of this nature, it involves very little; a spare USB port. To get the very most out of the drive though, you will be required to insert it into a USB 3.0 port. By doing so, you will gain extra speeds over the slower, older USB 1.1 and 2.0 interface.

To test a device like this, there are many different software applications on the market to show a comparison on performance, and whilst we could sit here all day running test upon test, the results would be roughly outputted as the same. Therefore we have chosen three popular software packages that are free to download so that you can compare your own purchases with the drive we are looking at today.

ATTO was the first benchmark that we looked at testing the drive with, and as you can clearly see the read results were nothing short of impressive. We generally take a look at the 1024 results which show a reading of 104MB/s which is slightly better than what we were expecting from this drive.

Sadly the write results were dreadful, looking at the same 1024 result, we can see that only a measly 23MB/s was obtained showing that this drive isn’t fantastic in all areas. When we also look at the smaller sizes we can see that the write speed doesn’t even register on the scale.

Next up in our testing was CrystalDiskMark which gave very similar results as ATTO. The read speeds were once again very impressive at 112MB/s yet the write speed at 28MB/s though is slightly better than what ATTO showed us is still very slow meaning that if you want to use this drive for constantly reading data off of it, you should be more than fine, though the initial transfer of putting that data onto the drive may take longer than you hoped for.

The last in our trio of tests brings us over to HDTach which has been a favourite tool for benchmarkers and consumers for many years now and still shows consistent results that are easy to read. We found that once again the read speed at burst was fantastic at 115.2MB/s with the average at 81.8MB/s and a fairly decent access time of 0.7ms. We feel that this drive would be perfect for having as a Windows installation drive if like us you are constantly reinstalling operating systems but anything more than this, we’d probably advise to go and buy something else.