Bolt USB 3.0 16GB

Packaging & Contents

The Busbi Bolt ships in a plastic bubble wrap. The box claims a read/write speed of 50/20 MB/s which is a little lower than the 54/35 level claimed on the busbi website. Since most users will purchase the drive online, we have taken the websites claimed speeds as the official figures for this drive. The drive comes with a two year warranty which is clearly printed on the back of the box.

Box Front

Box Back

Dimensions & Weight

The Busbi Bolt measures 5.9cm long, 1.7cm wide and 0.7cm high. These measurements make the Busbi the new smallest flash drive we have seen to date. As well as being exceptionally small the Busbi is also extremely light, weighing just 9.0 grams this flash drive can easily be left unnoticed in a shirt pocket.

Build Quality

The Busbi bolt is very well made. Despite its tiny size the Busbi feels solid, probably because all the electronics are densely packed together. There is blue indicator light which flashes when the drive is in operation. You can also easily and securely attach the drive to a keychain via the hidden inset pin at the bottom of the drive. The cap requires a reasonable amount of force to remove which we like as it significantly reduces the chance of loss.

Front

Back

Test System

CrystalDiskMark Speed Test^[FAQ]

CrystalDiskMark is a free disk benchmarking utility that is very simple to use. It takes eight measurements: the read and write speeds in megabytes per second (MBps) for sequential, 512KB, random 4KB and 4KB parallel disk operations. There are more screenshots from this benchmark posted on the web than any other, probably due to its clean and simple display. There is further information, including instructions on how to benchmark your own drives, on the CrystalDiskMark wiki page.

CrystalDiskMark Score

The Busbi Bolt scored 54/26 MB/s in the sequential read/write tests. These figures are below average for a USB 3.0 flash drive. The strongest relative area of performance for this drive is its 4K read score of 12.9 MB/s which is one of the higher 4K read we have seen on a 16GB flash drive. This makes the drive well suited to tasks requiring lots of small reads. Unfortunately its not all good news as the 4K write score of 0.08 MB/s is towards the lower end of the range. This drive is a good example of the fact that every flash drive has a unique performance profile, how well it will perform depends entirely on the workload its facing.

CrystalDiskMark Benchmark Speed Test

ATTO Disk Benchmark^[FAQ]

The Atto Disk Benchmark has probably been around for longer than any other disk benchmarking software, and you can tell from its dated interface! The utility was designed to measure regular disk drive performance but it's more than up to the task of measuring both USB flash drive and SSD speeds as well. The utility measures disk performance rates for various sizes of file and displays the results in a bar chart showing read and write speeds at each file size. The results are displayed in megabytes per second (MBps). There is further information, including instructions on how to benchmark your own drive, on the Atto wiki page.

ATTO Benchmark Speed Test

ATTO Score

The ATTO results for the Busbi Bolt are broadly in line with the CrystalDiskMark scores and at 50/28 MB/s come in just below Busbis claimed read/write speeds of 54/35 MB/s.

AS SSD Real World Copy Speed^[FAQ]

The AS SSD benchmarking program was recently developed specifically for benchmarking SSD's. The utility is able to take several measurements that are well suited to solid state drives. One of the tests, ISO copy, is also relevant to slower storage devices including flash drives. The ISO copy test places two large 500MB files in a folder on the drive and then times how long it takes to copy the folder to another location on the same drive. The result is reported in both MBps and time taken. It's a real-world test that gauges a drives ability to read and write at the same time. Drives that have a good balance between their read and write speed fare relatively well on this test. There is further information, including instructions on how to use it to benchmark your own drive, on the AS SSD wiki page.

Real World Copy Speed Score

This test shows that the Busbi Bolt would take 59.22 seconds to create a copy of a large 1GB video file. Generally flash drives complete this test at roughly half their sequential write rates. The Busbi Bolt performed relatively very well in this test.

AS-SSD Copy Benchmark Speed Test

Conclusion

The Busbi Bolt is a good little flash drive. It is the smallest drive we have seen to date. We appreciate its low weight, small dimensions and solid build quality. The Busbi is not a strong performer in the speed tests but it manages to beat some of its more expensive competitors and as a consequence represents above average value for money. If you looking for a very small USB 3.0 Flash drive, this is not a bad option at this time (there are still no micro USB 3.0 flash drives readily available).

USBFlashPro
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Original Review by:  
Updated 11 years ago.