I remember holding 64 megabytes of thumbdrive glory in my palm and thinking "Wow, this is pretty amazing."
Fast forward a little bit down the track and now I’m holding 16GB of storage power in a much smaller, sleeker, and infinitely powerful more shell and thinking the exact same things.
Lexar recently released a new series of Triton USB 3.0 flash drives, offering 20x the speed of USB 2.0 with suggested reads of 155MB/s and writes of 150MB/s. Copying your favorite 4GB high-definition movie? Well it will only take 35 seconds on this drive, as opposed to 11 minutes on the outdated USB 2.0 band.
We were lucky enough to get our hands on the 16GB model no less than a day after launch and below is our complete review and thoughts on Lexar’s powerful push into USB 3.0 thumbdrive territory.
Testing Rig:
Motherboard: ASUS M4A89GTD PRO USB3
CPU: AMD Phenom x4 955 Black Edition @ 3.8Ghz
RAM: 8GB DDR3 1600Mhz G-Skill Ripjaws X (9-9-9-24)
GPU: GTX 580 (1.5GB)
Note: All drives were benchmarked as is, out of the box.
Testing Programs:
ATTO Disk Benchmark – 2.47
HD Tune Pro – 4.61
CrystalDiskMark – 3.0.1
Test One:ATTO Disk Benchmark
ATTO Disk Benchmark (ATTO from here on out) is one of the most reliable disk storage benchmarking tools available. The freeware tool is widely accepted across the internet for providing accurate figures and results.
Lexar JumpDrive Triton USB 3.0 16GB Flash Drive
The first test in our review of the Lexar JumpDrive proved that the drive could in fact live up to the read promises that were made, and in fact ATTO even pushed it a little bit further than expected.
Unfortunately the drive failed to read the fabled writes of 150MB/s however the results shown were still quite good, and definitely not something to look down on.
Test Two: HD Tune Pro
We used HD Tune Pro in our testing to determine a number of factors in the read only division. Firstly, the program shows the IOPS performance of the drive on both the 512 bytes level, the 1 MB level and when used in a random fashion. We were then able to find out the average speed of the drive across all three size levels, as well as the access time.
Lexar JumpDrive Triton USB 3.0 16GB Flash Drive
When presented similar results to what we saw in our ATTO benchmarking segment, I wasn’t all that surprised. Access times were great across the board, with the Triton even registering access times both close to and better than the OCZ Agility 3 240GB SSD from my last review.
Test Three: CrystalDiskMark
CrystalDiskMark is the final program used for our review, and provides a swathe of results similar to that seen in AS SSD. Testing the drives across a number of fronts, CrystalDiskMark (CDM from here) is another comprehensive and widely recognised testing platform.
We were originally going to present the data and results in graph format however we felt it was easier to interpret the results of the singular product in their raw and original format.
Lexar JumpDrive Triton USB 3.0 16GB Flash Drive 
The sequential read and write speeds were similar, if not almost identical to those seen in the ATTO benchmarking leg of our review. It’s good to see consecutive results, not only to reassure the customer, but also to prove the device can live up to its promises!
The 512k test of CDM shows each drives performance at writing data in 512k blocks, which not only offers real world insights, but also shows us valuable data you can use when purchasing any flash memory based device. The Triton performed admirably in the read section of the 512k test, however failed to above 10MB/s in the writing section.
The 4k test, as with the 512k test, shows writing and reading performance to the drives but with the tiniest of file sizes.
When it came to writing smaller files the Triton excelled, proving that it could do great work for people writing and saving number of word documents at once. You could also use it to compile code directly to, giving you security and piece of mind.
Conclusion
With impressive speeds that not only live up to the advertisements, but also exceed them, the Lexar Triton is an impressive piece of mobile data technology. On the same hand though I see it’s biggest speed drawcard also being the one thing that holds it back.
Being able to copy high-definition movies and large sized files is great, but if the PC you’re taking it to doesn’t have USB 3.0 then you’re out of luck.
With plenty of space, speed, and looks, the Triton should be your first contender when looking at purchasing a USB 3.0 supported flash drive.
