Packaging & Contents
The PQI micro USB 3.0 ships in a plastic bubble wrap. It’s a small simple no fuss package. On the front of the box we found a lifetime guarantee logo but there were no claimed maximum read/write speeds. On the back of the box there is a logo indicating windows 7 compatibility and again no indication of what sort of speed to expect from this drive. On the manufacturers website speeds of 90/18.5 (read/write) MB/s are indicated for the 32GB version which sets expectations pretty low for the 16GB version currently under review.
Box Front
Box Back
Dimensions & Weight
The PQI Mini measures 3.1cm long, 1.5cm wide and 0.7cm high which is way below average in terms of total size and bulkiness for a flash drive. This is in fact the smallest USB 3.0 flash drive we have ever seen. The manufacturer claims it is the smallest travelling disk in the industry and various web sites have touted this drive as being the smallest USB 3.0 memory stick in the world!
Build Quality
The tiny body of PQI is reasonably solid and dense. There is a permanently on blue LED indicator on the drive which flashes when the drive is in operation. The cap attaches reasonably snugly and there is a convenient (and removable) plastic clip on the lanyard where you can place the cap whilst the drive is in use. Overall the build quality is good.
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Test System
The test rig was a high end Core-i7 workstation kitted out with a 256GB Solid State drive and 16GB of RAM. The system was designed to be overclocked to 5GHZ but for the benchmarks, only the stock frequencies of 1.6GHz idle, 3.4GHz active and 3.8GHz turbo boost were used.
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 PQI proved to have very disappointing performance figures with sustained read/write scores of 45/12 MB/s. As with many flash drives the PQI also struggled in the random write tests where it scored just 0.13 MB/s which is towards the bottom end of the range we have seen. The strongest area of relative performance was in the 4K Read test where the PQI scored a respectable 7 MB/s.
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 of 45/12 MB/s sequential read/write are exactly in line with the CrystalDiskMark tests results, and equally disappointing. Both sets of figures are right at the bottom of the range of speeds we have seen on USB 3.0 thumb drives.
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 PQI mini would take 127.94 seconds to create a copy of a large 1GB video file. This score is actually above expectations but only relative to the pitifully slow write speed already observed in the previous tests. Generally flash drives complete this test at roughly half their sequential write rates, so the PQI outperformed expectations by 33%.
AS-SSD Copy Benchmark Speed Test
Conclusion
The PQI Micro is not a fast performer, in fact, it's the slowest USB 3.0 thumb drive we have reviewed to date and it's also considerably over priced. There is however one saving grace for this drive, its form factor is by far the smallest we have ever seen on a USB 3.0 drive. Every single dimension (length, breadth, height, volume, weight) comes in lower than the USB 3.0 competition. So if you want a tiny USB 3.0 thumb drive and you can live with relatively slow performance then this could be the drive for you. We would suggest checking the various micro USB 2.0 options before purchasing this drive, you might find better value for money with only slightly slower performance.
Original Review by: Updated 11 years ago.
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