Express DUO USB 3.0 16GB

Packaging & Contents

The Express Duo ships in a flat packed piece of cardboard with a small plastic shell housing the unit. It’s a simple no fuss package that does its job just fine. There are no instructions or warranty registration forms etc, just the flash drive.

Box Front

Box Back

Dimensions & Weight

The Express DUO measures 6.9cm long, 1.8cm wide and 0.8cm high which is below average in terms of total size and bulkiness for a flash drive. With these dimensions there is no chance that this flash drive will obstruct adjacent ports on a computer, the drive is barely thicker than the USB port its self. As well as being one of the smallest drives on test the Express Duo is also one of the lightest weighing in at just under 10 grams, its small form factor and weight make this drive well suited to shirt pocket use.

Build Quality

If we had to pick one weakness in the Express Duo it would undoubtedly be build quality. The drive felt as though it could snap each time we plugged it in. There is a half plastic ring on the back of the drive where you could attach a keychain but it looks like it could easily snap. The cap slips on snugly without clicking. On a positive note the Express Duo has an excellent LED light which illuminates the whole of the back plate when its in use.

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 Express Duo put in a reasonable performance with sustained read/write scores of 69.8/19.9 MB/s. As with many flash drives the Express Duo struggled is in the random write tests where it scored just 0.19 MB/s which is roughly in line with many of the flash drives we have looked at. The strongest area for the Express Duo is in the random read test where it managed to score 10.38 MB/s, this is a very decent performance and makes this drive relatively well suited to booting operating systems.

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 results for the Express Duo are broadly in line with the CrystalDiskMark scores and show average sequential read/writes at 60/18 MB/s.

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

This test shows that the Express Duo would take 99.51 seconds to create a copy of a large 1GB video file. This score is in line with expectations for the Duo. Generally flash drives complete this test at roughly half their sequential write rates, and that’s exactly what the Express Duo did with its score of 10.8 MB/s.

AS-SSD Copy Benchmark Speed Test

Conclusion

The Express Duo was one of the first USB 3.0 drives to be mass produced, it has been in production for nearly two years. Benchmarks for the Express Duo are reasonable but it does not excel in any areas. In terms of size and weight the Express Duo is almost class leading but it is let down by its flimsy build construction. Some time ago this drive was retailing for around £15 at which time it was excellent value, for some reason the prices have gone up to £25 leaving this drive overpriced.

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Original Review by:  
Updated 11 years ago.