C650 USB 3.0 16GB

Packaging & Contents

The Emtec C650 ships on a small piece of card with a plastic bubble housing the drive. On the front of the package we found the capacity of the drive, a claimed read speed of 50 MB/s and details of the five year warranty. No write speed ratings were indicated on the box.

Dimensions & Weight

The Emtec measures 5.4cm long, 2.1cm wide and 1.0cm high. Due to its shape the Emtec looks a lot smaller in the hand than its dimensions would indicate, that's because the dimensions quoted for the drive are at its widest point. In terms of weight at 10 grams the Emtec is amongst the lighter drives.

Build Quality

The Emtec has below average build quality. The retractable mechanism feels a little cheap and the drive is a little hollow. At the back of the drive there is a hole where a keychain can be attached. The back of the drive also has is a permanently on red LED which flashes when the drive is in use.

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.

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.

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.

Conclusion

The Emtec C650 is not particularly well made, the retractable mechanism feels cheap and the drive does not perform particularly well either. At this time there are far better deals to be had.