Adata Nobility N005 16GB

Full Review

The Adata Nobility Series N005 16GB is a no-nonsense USB flash drive. With the looks of a traditional USB pendrive, you might mistake it for a regular such product, except that is what it isn't. The blue USB connector gives away a crucial detail - that the N005 is a USB 3.0 product, with faster speeds than the standard ones we are used to.

Design
Not wanting to take chances, the Adata N005 USB drive uses the standard "drive and cap" design. You need to open the cap to access the USB connector. The good thing is that the black-colored cap can be plugged into the back of the drive, so there are less chances of losing it.

The body of the drive is rounded on one side and has edges/flat surface on the other side. That makes it useful to be stood up on edge, but that is about all this relatively interesting shape is useful for. The surface has a matte feel and brownish-grey color. The drive got through plenty of usage without ever starting to look like it was accumulating fingerprints, a change we welcome.

Features
The packaging was quite a simple box unlike the plastic-wrapped packages of some other brands. No software was bundled. Notably, the drive got quite warm in operation. This is either because of the way its heat dissipation is designed or because it does actually get that warm for some reason. In either case, it's worth keeping in mind that coming across a pendrive getting warm to the touch is unusual.

After formatting, it offers 14.3 GB (GigaBytes) of actual usable space. Unusual again! Flash drives rated for a storage capacity of 16GB in the USB 2.0 range usually have 15.1 GB of usable space.

The drive is available in capacities of 16GB, 32GB and 64GB. This USB 3.0 drive is also backward-compatible with slower USB 2.0 ports.

Performance
In synthetic benchmarks, read and write speeds averaged 70.1 MB/s and 26.8 MB/s respectively, with a CPU utilization of 1 per cent and read access times of 0.19 ms (milli-seconds) on average.

In real world tests, read speed average for both large and small files stood at 77.8 MB/s even across system reboots. Write speed while copying a single large file of 6.42 GB onto the drive stood at 20.5 MB/s. Copying multiple smaller files (800 files totaling up to 6.36 GB) onto the drive was at a speed of 11 MB/s.

This drive is fast indeed, and test results mentioned here were obtained over an NEC USB 3.0 drive controller. The write speeds are understandably lower than read, yet are better than what we observe on USB 2.0 drives.

Bottom Line

The Adata N005 16GB pendrive is fast! The best part about the read speeds being three times faster than usually seen on USB 2.0 drives, is that we no longer have to quibble about "speed limitations of USB interface" for external storage devices. It does not look like the cutesy tiny flash drives that seem to be in vogue today, but when read speeds are as fast as an internal HDD, the N005 is an awesome buy at a small price premium.