Introduction

Walton Chaintech, a company which manufactures lots of products like SSDs, Memory Modules, Memory Cards and Graphics Cards, does also produce Flash Drives. The AstroDrive 266X I have received for review is the smallest in the series, maroon colored. The flash drive has very good performances right out of the box, but Walton Chaintech also included a special utility on the drive to boost the performance even more.

I want to thank Walton Chaintech for making a review of the AstroDrive 266X 16GB Flash Drive possible.

About the company

The Chaintech Computer Corporation was founded in November of 1986 and introduced its own motherboards and video cards into the computer hardware market. Before long, Chaintech earned a reputation for producing state-of-the-art motherboards, boasting unsurpassed performance, extreme reliability, and aesthetical design. Its video cards were also praised by critics and consumers alike, earning recommendations and awards throughout the international community. With an established, technologically sound foundation, Chaintech was now primed to focus on product diversification.

In 2005, a partnership was formed between Chaintech and Walton Advanced Engineering in order to introduce new products into the memory modules markets. Walton Advanced Engineering, known for their integrated circuits (IC) testing and packaging, provided valuable expertise and insight in designing, manufacturing, and packaging the newly introduced products. The partnership was further solidified by Chaintech’s membership into the Passive System Alliance (PSA), whereby a total of twenty companies, five of which are publicly traded, would ultimately mutually collaborate and share resources.

Specifications

Dimension: 80(L)x18(W)x8(H)mm

Weight: Max. 22g

Density:16~64GB

Read Performance: Up to 41.4 MB/Sec

Write Performance: Up to 29.5 MB/Sec

Compliance OS: Window XP, Vista, Win 7

Certification: CE, FCC

Windows 7 compliant

Inside the box

The USB Flash Drive named AstroDrive from Walton Chaintech comes in a transparent plastic package; on its frontal part we can see the product itself, its capacity, the fact that it is a USB 2.0 Flash Drive and comes with a 2-year warranty:



On the back of the package, we can see a product description in multiple languages, the features and supported operating systems:



The flash drive has a protective cap which preserves the same colors as the rest of the drives' body; on the frontal part we can see the APOGEE logo along with the flash drives' name and its capacity:



On the other side of the drive, we can see only the metallic paint, without any inscriptions:



The bottom of the flash drive has a hole through which we can install a lanyard, which is not included in the package:



If we remove the protective cap, we can see on the USB connector the capacity of the flash drive and a serial number:

Performance Tests

The test bench is composed of the ASUS X55SV laptop, the one that I have used for all the Flash Drive tests I have done before.

When inserted, the red LED from the bottom of the flash drive lights up and blinks only when we access data or copy information onto the flash drive:



After opening the Windows Explorer application, we can see that the drive is not an empty, it holds an application:



The flash drive comes formatted FAT32 and the included application along with the documentation in PDF format takes about 1MB of its total space:



The application that comes with this particular flash drive is meant to boost its read/write speed and it's named USBest Turbo:



When loaded, the application has an information screen, which tells us the name of the flash drive, its capacity, the remaining free space and the Turbo feature status; the Turbo feature can be activated by pressing the Turbo ON button:



Enabling Turbo on Windows 7 x64 is a real issue, because the drivers that USBest application is trying to install are not signed for this particular OS and the device will end up in Device Manager with an exclamation mark:



To make it work we have to disable the "Digital Driver Signing" in Windows 7; one temporary solution would be to press F8 when booting Windows and selecting the option to disable the Digital Driver Signing check. With this operation done, we will be able to use Turbo Mode:



To test the drive speeds in non-Turbo and Turbo modes, I have used the HD Tune Pro application, with its Benchmark tab:

APOGEE AstroDrive 16GB Turbo Off



APOGEE AstroDrive 16GB Turbo ON



Summary Graph ( Read Performance )



To test the write speeds, I have used the File Benchmark test:

APOGEE AstroDrive 16GB Turbo Off



APOGEE AstroDrive 16GB Turbo ON



Summary graph ( Write speeds for 64MB files with 8192 block size )



Here are also some real world tests, in which I have used the Total Commander File Manager, to transfer a file from the HDD to the flash drive and back:

Copy test

APOGEE AstroDrive 16GB Turbo Off



APOGEE AstroDrive 16GB Turbo ON



Read test

APOGEE AstroDrive 16GB Turbo Off



APOGEE AstroDrive 16GB Turbo ON

Conclusive Thoughts

Compared with the flash drives I have tested in the past from various manufacturers, this particular product has very good read/write performances with Turbo Off and excellent performances with the Turbo On feature. There is a drawback through, the impossibility to enable the feature without disabling the check for signed drivers in Windows 7.

I really hope the manufacturer will fix this issue by supplying flash drives with a newer version of the utility; people that bought the flash drive from previous batches should find the updated utility on Walton Chaintechs' website.


Larger sizes are available too of the AstroDrive!

Regarding the flash drives' appearance, it looks very solid and it has a protective cap against damages to the USB connector. The flash drive also does have a hole to fit in a lanyard, but, unfortunately, it is not included in the package. I would surely recommend to anyone this flash drive with very good read/write performance.

I like to thank Walton Chaintech for making this review possible.