VisionTek USB Pocket SSD 120GB (900718), Pocket Sized Speed Demon

Final Thoughts & Conclusions

The VisionTek USB 3.0 Pocket SSD at times performed 2 to 3 times better than most USB 3.0 Flash drives. It’s one of the fastest USB 3.0 Flash type drives on the market using the thumb drive form factor. It’s builtlike a tank and built to take punishment so the longevity of the drive should be pretty good. The VisionTek USB 3.0 Pocket SSD Uses the SandForce SF-2281 controller and DuraWrite technology. DuraWrite technology reduces the amount of data written to the internal NAND flash memory using data compression. The more the data can be compressed the faster the drive runs.

Price is a bit of an issue at $99.95 you can get comparable sized Thumb drives for around half the price. Where the VisionTek really shines in reformatted to 4k blocks with XHCI / UASP enabled and we really don’t see much wrong with doing that on your personal home computer. The 4k block reformatting will carry over to machines outside the home and certainly to laptops but using the drive on work computers and public computers we don’t see them letting you enable  XHCI / UASP so it’s a mixed bag.

The VisionTek USB 3.0 Pocket SSD properly formatted and utilizing  XHCI / UASP stands up and runs away from other USB 3.0 drives with this form factor. Our question would be if that is the performance mode (4k NTFS blocks) why isn’t it shipped with that format? Using a 4K format is called Advanced Format and hard drives using the legacy 512k blocks are slowly moving to 4K Advanced Formatting because it is more efficient and reduces drive overhead.

The 4k reformatted size works wonders for the VisionTek USB 3,0 Pocket SSD but in order to get full Kudos for it they would have to ship the drive formatted to 4k, An estimated 95% of all end users take a product out of a package and use it as is without modifications. However even without modification to the format we are happy with the performance of the VisionTek USB 3.0 Drive but a little iffy at the $99.99 price. If anything the drive could partially re-marketed as an Ultra Durable Pocket SSD and garner the price easily.

Down to Bear facts: The VisionTek USB Pocket SSD 120GB (900718) fell a bit short of advertised speeds when tested as shipped, it met the advertised speeds when reformatted to 4k. A drive this durable and fast with an aircraft grade aluminum casing is hard to find, performance even formatted to the legacy 512k Sector size.  So at this time we are awarding the VisionTek USB 3,0 Pocket SSD the Bjorn3D Silver Bear Award with the notation if it’s shipped with 4k sectors at a later time, or an executable file is included on the drive to re-format it to 4k sectors the award is up-gradable.