After we discussed slower thumb drives taking a LONG time to read playlists in the MINI, especially for those who want to bring over 2 gigs of data, I decided to research a bit. I found that the fastest benchmarked thumbdrive on the market looks to be the Kingston Datatraveler 400. I have a large 16 gb datatraveller, but never thought to worry about the speed. Checked it tonight... 10Mb speeds vs close to 29Mb speeds on the DT400.

Food for thought! Might pick up a DT400 this week and see how well it does in the Cooper. Will let you know how it goes.

 

Please do let us know how the testing comes out. I had done some testing a year plus ago with 6Mb and 10Mb transfer speeds and it did not make much difference but 10 to almost 30 is a much larger difference.

 

It's on the way from Amazon as we speak. Figured with a 4GB version at 17 bucks, I really couldn't go wrong. I swore I needed gobs and gobs of space at first, and ran out and purchased a 16GB slow as molasses Datatraveller, and noticed I only have playlists around the 300 song \ 2 gb size, so a smaller thumb drive won't bother me too much.

More to follow...

 

OK, it arrived today. Testing it out via MediaMonkey it didn't seem a LOT faster in writing about 2 gigs of data.

But, here's the catch... When I put it into the car, it read it immediately! No wait whatsoever! (well, maybe a 2 second wait, but that's not really a "wait")

After testing it in MS Vista, it was reading at about 28.6 MB per second, and writing at about 14.4 MB per second. Well above the advertised speeds!!!

A great buy at $17 off of Amazon.com!

Gluck

 

I've got an 8GB SanDisk that writes at about 12MB/sec and reads at about 20MB/sec in the car right now... It takes the car 15 seconds to pull up 8GB of music fully tagged... I think the speed of the USB drive has a LOT to do with how much you wait...