14 DAY TRIAL // It's no secret that the USB 3.0 technology allows for transfer speeds of 5 Gbps, in theory, but in practice, no products have actually managed to use all that performance. VisionTek has just made a pretty good attempt though.
Since the SuperSpeed USB 3.0 technology allows for 5 Gbps transfers, that means that devices connected to a PC or other system through it should be able to reach 625 MB/s.
No flash drives or external/portable solid state drives or hard disk drives (SSDs/HDDs) actually do that well though, and they probably won't until USB 4.0 comes around.
Still, occasionally there are product releases that manage to waste less than half of that transfer speed headroom, and the newest VisionTek flash drive is one of them.
The VisionTek USB Pocket SSD product series
As you can see, VisionTek doesn't market this product line as a flash drive collection, but as a solid state drive that just happens to possess a thumb drive form factor.
Of course, pretty much all flash drives can be described in that manner, since both SSDs and USB flash drives use NAND Flash chips, but we digress.
The VisionTek USB Poclet SSDs have up to 240 GB of storage space encased inside a shell made of aircraft-grade aluminum.
More importantly, the drives can achieve a read speed of 455 MB/s and a writing speed of up to 440 MB/s. This performance is owed to an LSI SandForce controller and is better than that of many SSDs.
Furthermore, installing Windows 8/8.1 lets you turn the VisionTek USB Pocket SSD into a boot drive, which means you can always start your preferred PC configuration when switching PCs or going to a friend's house to troubleshoot problems. VisionTek calls this an "office-on-the-go" solution.
All in all, the company speaks truly in its press release when it says that the USB Pocket SSD is the equal of internal, aftermarket solid state drives.
Availability and pricing
The VisionTek USB 3.0 Pocket SSD removable storage devices with 120 GB and 240 GB capacities should be up for order soon, if they aren't already, for the price of $110 / €87 and $175 / €138, respectively. The company sells them directly, or you can try to go through online retailers and e-tailers.
After that, whether you use it as a means to ferry large volumes of data, an OS boot drive or just as a backup drive is up to you.
