TE Review ADATA N005 Pro USB 3.0 Flash Drive Review

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Introduction
ADATA, a familiar name in our community are well known for their flash memory based products. Their representative got in touch to take a look at some of their products and we are kicking things off with a USB flash drive review, the Nobility Series N005 Pro (quite a long name) with a capacity of 64 GB. Watch out for the SSD review coming soon as well.

Initial Impressions

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Starting off with the packing, the N005 came in a large sized box which however contained only the pen drive and a simple paper manual. There wasn’t any lanyard or keychain or any other goodies bundled in.

Build Quality
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<Ting> that’s the sound you get when you ring your fingernail against the body of the drive. Made from anodized aluminium the drive has a solid feel to it. It’s not obvious initially since we are used to the run of the mill plastic drives and we don’t expect any other material. Also the first step to using it is to remove the cap which was made from plastic and you expect the body to be the same. Thumbs up to ADATA here. You’re not going to get a panic attack if you drop it and roll your chair over it.

Cons: Plastic cap isn’t fixed to the body and will most likely be lost even though ADATA has a provision to let you fix it on the back like a pen.

Size and Dimensions
The drive is long but slim, I prefer this form factor since it’s easier to fit in your pocket rather than a fat and bulky profile. At 3.5 inches length though I found it a bit fiddly since the gap between the back of my PC and the wall isn’t that long. Extension cable recommended.

Performance
On to the stuff most people want to know, a few quick file transfer speed tests.

Test Rig
Core i7 2600k
16 GB Ram
Biostar TZ68K+ (ASMedia ASM1042 USB 3.0 controller)
256 GB Samsung 840 Pro SSD

The Contenders

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Just to give a rough comparison the following drives were thrown in

1. Kingston D2 Ultimate G2 16 GB
2. Kingston Data Traveller Elite 3.0 32 GB
 
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Click to expand...
Crystal Diskmark


Note: All drives were formatted in exFat with 128 KB allocation size

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In the above test the N005 showed consistent performance in both sequential and random write tests. Performance did go down in the 4k tests. Here the Elite 2.0 seemed to look the better balanced performer.


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The N005 puts on a good show. Moving on to the USB 2.0 Benchmarks,

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Here read performances for all the USB 3.0 drives was maxing out USB 2.0 capabilities for read. The Elite 2.0 again had the upper hand all around though

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The N005 does well in write tests. This could be due to the additional flash memory improving write speeds.



ATTO Benchmark

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Real World Test

One common application of pen drives for me personally is to distribute software to clients. So I tried testing copy times to all 3 drives. The software size is 2.92 GB compressed. When uncompressed the size increases to 3.11 GB and contains slightly over 2400 files, of which one is 2 GB and the rest vary from 100 MB to 1KB. There are well over 1500+ files that are below 10KB and this is a good mix of large and small file sizes.

To remove the vagaries of a hard drive the file was first copied to a RAM Disk and then copied to the pen drives to test write speeds. Read speed testing was done by copying back to the RAM Disk but it may not be realistic since it depends on the speed of the device it is copied to. However the results are included.

Lower times are better, Read times as m:s E.g. 2.26 as 2 mins 26 secs

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Both the ADATA and the DT Ultimate were closely matched with the N005 edging ahead in almost all the tests.
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Final Thoughts

The N005 has a price of Rs.3,900/- Expect street pricing to be lower. It also comes with a lifetime warranty and according to ADATA, it is a true lifetime warranty, it can be claimed for an infinite period as long as there is no physical damage to the drive. Looking at the price, warranty and performance I would say the N005 should definitely be on your list of choices while shopping around for a portable USB drive.​
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such a detailed review. will wait a couple of months for the price to drop to sub 2.5k levels n get one.. :)
 
Excellent review. One suggestion though: The colour scheme of the last graph should have matched the scheme used elsewhere. On first look, I thought the DT Ultimate was the better performer in a real world scenario.
 
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