Performance -
Testing the performance of a drive of any type is a pain. Sure you can get repeatable numbers using a few of the more readily available testing utilities; Sisoft’s SANDRA, HD Tune, PCMark7’s Storage Suite, AIDA64, and others.

Sisoft SANDRA -
The storage tests in SANDRA cover the range of IOPs (Input/Output operations per second) to actual data transfer rates based on an aggregate or average rating. We use this for a baseline for the rest of our testing.

SANDRA came back with a score of 61MB/s this puts us a little behind the stated 70MB/s read speeds on the front of the package. Still it is not far enough to be all that concerned. You should not have any issues with reading your data off of this drive when you need to.

AIDA64 -
AIDA64 does a great job of showing the different levels of performance for different read functions. This allows us to establish a clearer baseline for the rest of our performance comparison.

AIDA64 confirms the 61MB/s read speeds that SANDRA gave us. We are also seeing that the drive has issues with linear reads from the middle clusters of the drives formatting. This is becoming more common with flash dives as we see read performance at the beginning and end of the drive increase the middle suffers.

PCMark7 Storage Tests -
The PCMark 7 suite of storage tests is fairly intensive and includes scanning for malware, moving images, a video editing script and more items that require good HDD read and write speeds each one of these has its own transfer rate that will be recorded and combine to make up the overall score.

The DT Elite managed to pull off a 1422 PCMark07 Storage score with some fairly decent general access times. The best performance was during the Video Editing test at 10.58MB/s while the worst performance fell to 0.49MB/s during the music add test. Basically you would not want to use this as a primary drive for something like Windows 7.

HD Tune Pro 4.6 -
HD Tune Pro is another application that can give you the run down on your HDDs it performs both read and write tests although its write test is destructive and cannot be run on a drive that contains any partition information. For our testing here we ran both the read and write tests and recorded the average transfer rates.

HDTune really backs up the rest of the performance numbers here which gives us our final speed estimate on the DT Elite; 61MB/s. This is not bad and certainly mush faster than any of the USB 2.0 keys we have (they max out at around 32MB/s).

General use -
As we mentioned before there is a move to making the most of how cheap flash drives have become. Although we showed you the SurfEasy (which is a USB key with a portable browser and a proxy service), many are not going to be interested in that because their data still goes through someone else’s servers (and they stated they will cooperate with law enforcement). So what has been happening is an increased use of tools like the Tor Browser package. You take this and drop it on a USB key and you get secure (fairly) anonymous browsing where ever you go. You can also drop in an OS and use this for a live OS key. We tested the DT Elite with both of these in mind and had no problem with it at all. Running the Tor Browser the DT Elite was smooth and more than able to keep up with the requests we made of it (although the TOR network is not the fastest). When we just ran FireFox portable our internet speed up quite a bit, but we did not have the advantage of anonymity any more as we were not using any proxies.

Still overall the DT Elite has some solid performance. It is not top dog for sure , but you will get some nice read numbers when you are trying to access your files.