Store n Go V3 Max USB 3.0 16GB

Packaging & Contents

The Verbatim V3 Max ships on a flat piece of card with a plastic bubble wrap. There is an indicated speed of 175Mb/s stated which ambiguously refers to the sequential read speed. On the back of the packaging the supported operating systems together with links to various free downloads including Verbatim's password protection software package.

Box Front

Box Back

Dimensions & Weight

The V3 max measures 5.8cm long, 2.0cm wide and 1.1cm high, which are slightly below average dimensions for a flash drive. Weighing 10 grams, the V3 Max is slightly heavier than most the drives we have tested.

Build Quality

There are no indicator led lights on the V3 Max so there is no way to be sure whether or not the drive is in use, a negative. On the plus side the design is retractable so there is no cap to loose. Overall the V3 Max feels solid and well made. There is a reasonably sturdy plastic hoop where a lanyard can be attached.

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 CrystalDiskMark scores for the V3 Max are heavily skewed towards reading. With a very impressive sequential read of 171.8 Mbps this drive is bested by only a small handful of drives for read speed. Unfortunately the sequential write of 42.62 MBps is not nearly as impressive and falls somewhere around the middle of the pack. There is also an almost alarming drop in speed between the sequential write of 42.6 MBps and the 512K write of just 1.46 MBps. This suggests that the controller on the Verbatim is heavily optimized for large file writes. The 4k random write speed of 0.013 MBps is very disappointing and leaves a large gap in the V3 Max's performance profile.

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 V3 Max are broadly in line with the CrystalDiskMark figures and at 180 / 45 MBps come in comfortably over Verbatims claimed 175 MBps for this flash drive.

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

The real world copy speed we observed for the V3 max is a refreshingly high 28.7 MBps, which over performed our expectations by nearly 50%, generally drives are able to copy at around half their sequential write speed. The original Verbatim V3 Store n Go (non Max version) struggled severely on this particular test, it's good to see that this newer drive has improved significantly in this area.

AS-SSD Copy Benchmark Speed Test

Conclusion

The V3 Max is one of the better flash drives we have seen in 2013. It has superb sequential read ability, a great retractable form factor and the drive is reasonably solid. On the down side the drive demonstrated a very weak 4K write score which means that working with large numbers of small files could be painfully slow. For a lot of users that only use flash drives to carry media files this weakness should not present a big problem. The V3 Max has only recently come to market and as such we expect prices to drop, when they do this drive may well offer superb value for money but at the moment there are a better deals to be had elsewhere.

USBFlashPro
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Original Review by:  
Updated 10 years ago.