I’m a fan of flash drives that write in a flash. This pretty much left me griping about some high priced units that failed to meet the Windows Vista Readyboost requirement.

Here’s my tale of woe.

Last week I spent hundreds of dollars on the following crap-ups:

Transcend 110 4GB with SLC
Transcend 120 2GB with SLC
PQI U339 4GB
PQI U190
and so on…

I truly thought that with their badge of “Ultra Speed” on the box, as well as jargon like
“SLC flash”, I’d get speedy transfer rates.

What I got was a disappointment.

Turns out many of these thumb drives have only a small portion of it in SLC speed mode (some 256 MB of it). The rest is slow flash storage.

But the Apacer Handy Steno AH320 was different. The moment you plug it in, windows automatically configures it for readyboost. Ive observed consistently faster loading times of apps- especially Photoshop and CorelDraw. It shaves some 7 to 11 seconds off startup. Oh- and audio processing at adobe audition skyrockets too. A 50MB soundfile that I normally run some scripts on takes 40 seconds without readyboost. 19 seconds with.

Now don’t you think that’s worth the investment?