(Review) - A while back, we evaluated OCZ’s Mini-Kart flash drive, and despite its shortcomings, we recommended it based on the price alone (you can get the 2GB version for $40.99). Not only is the Mini-Kart the world’s smallest flash drive, but it’s also competitively priced, which makes it a wonderful resource for those of you who are looking to quickly transfer files back-and-forth without really a need for security options or other features that tend to drive up the retail price.

In Part I, we mainly looked at Mini-Kart strictly from a features and specifications standpoint. At the time, we decided to skip on performance to better compare it against some of the latest offerings from OCZ’s key competitors, one of which is SanDisk.

In today’s article, we will analyze Mini-Kart’s performance against SanDisk’s Cruzer Titanium U3 flash drive. Both drives are USB 2.0, though they differ in onboard storage sizes: 1GB Mini-Kart vs. 2GB Cruzer Titanium U3.

We conducted the tests using SiSoftware Sandra 2007 SP1 Removable Storage tests. Although SiSoftware Sandra isn’t exactly real-world performance comparison, it mimicked our real-world tests perfectly. We homebrewed a number of tests to compare against our Sandra results, and they matched perfectly. Therefore, we decided to skip on our tests and use Sandra instead. This will also give you the opportunity to compare these results against yours.

Our test system consists of an Intel Centrino Pentium M 1.86GHz microprocessor (Sony VAIO VGN-S560P notebook), 1.5GB of RAM, Windows XP SP2 and NVIDIA GeForce Go 6400 graphics adapter. The system was upgraded with latest updates for Windows as well as for all other applications. Everything in the system is stock configuration, except for physical memory which was upgraded from 512MB to 1.5GB.

Next