Ventura USB 3.0 16GB

Packaging & Contents

The Ventura ships in a plastic bubble wrap, there are no indications of speed or warranty information. The packaging for Ventura was the most non-descript we had seen on any flash drive.

Box Front

Box Back

Dimensions & Weight

The Ventura measures 5.7cm long, 2cm wide and 0.7cm high. With these dimensions there is no chance that this flash drive will obstruct adjacent ports on a computer, the drive is barely thicker than the USB port its self. This flash drive weighs 9 grams making it both extremely light and small. At 0.7cm high this is the thinnest flash drive we have seen and you can really tell when you hold it in your hand, its tiny.

Build Quality

The Ventura is the smallest USB 3.0 drive we have seen so far. There is a red LED indicator light on the back of the drive which flashes when the drive is in operation. The build quality on the Ventura is way above average, the cap fits reasonably snugly and the housing for a key ring at the back is also reasonably strong. Mushkin have done a good job on the build construction given this drives small size and weight.

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 Ventura scored 66/25 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 12.0 MB/s which is one of the highest 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 0.02 MB/s is amongst the worst we have seen. 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 Ventura are broadly in line with the CrystalDiskMark scores and at 67/24 MB/s come in comfortably over Mushkin's claimed read/write speeds of 50/20 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 Ventura would take 62.23 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 Ventura performed relatively very well in this test.

AS-SSD Copy Benchmark Speed Test

Conclusion

The Mushkin Ventura is the smallest USB 3.0 flash drive we have tested. There is no chance that this flash drive will obstruct adjacent ports on a computer as the drive is barely thicker than the USB port its self. From a value perspective this drive is very close to the bottom of the pack, not only is its performance below average but its price is currently significantly above average resulting in a terrible value rating for the Ventura.

USBFlashPro
level
1,312

Original Review by:  
Updated 11 years ago.