Blaze B10 USB 3.0 16GB

Packaging & Contents

The Blaze B10 ships in a flat packed piece of cardboard with a small plastic shell housing the unit. The package has a small heat sensitive patch on the front which when touched for a while changes colour. There are links to Silicon Power's website where you can download a suite of USB flash drive tools which, amongst other things, include backup and encryption module. The drive also comes with a generous lifetime warranty.

Box Front

Box Back

Dimensions & Weight

The Blaze B10 weighs 10 grams and measures 7.2cm long, 1.7cm wide and 1.0cm high. At 7.2cm the Blaze B10 is slightly longer than an average flash drive. The drive is slightly tapered at the front and back and has a secure hole where you can safely attach a keychain without fear of loosing the drive. The Blaze B10 amongst the lighter flash drives.

Build Quality

The Blaze B10 has heat sensitive patches that change colour, or blaze, as the drive heats up during use. The overall feel of the drive is not great. The body of the drive feels slightly hollow and the plastic is thin. The cap comes off very easily and cant be attached to the back of the drive.

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 Blaze B10 scored 45.83/19.93 MB/s in the sequential read/write tests. These scores are approximately 50% higher than an average USB 2.0 drive and leave the Blaze B10 amongst the slower USB 3.0 drives. The best performing area for the drive was the random 4K read test where the drive managed to score 8.5MB/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 scores for the Blaze B10 are in line with its CrystalDiskMark scores but lag far behind the claimed maximum read speed of 75MB/s. Its nice to see the benchmarks validating each other, but its just a shame that the performance is far below expectations.

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 Blaze B10 would take 86.99 seconds to create a copy of a large 1GB video file. This score is roughly in line with expectations given the 20MB/s read scores we saw in the ATTO and CrystalDiskMark tests. Generally flash drives complete this test at roughly half their sequential write rates.

AS-SSD Copy Benchmark Speed Test

Conclusion

We are disappointed with this drive, its performance is only approximately 50% higher than an average USB 2.0 drive and its not priced particularly aggressively. There are not many reasons to buy this drive. The drive glows, or blazes, when it gets warm but this didn't do it any favours during our lab tests.

USBFlashPro
level
1,312

Original Review by:  
Updated 11 years ago.