The drive performs well; when checked with HD Tach average read speed varied between 27.6 and 28.9MB/s, which to put in context is only about 10 MB/s slower than a 7200RPM Seagate Barracuda. Average seek time was just as impressive at 0.8MS, which is about similar as what you would expect from most average hard drives.

I was unable to make use of benchmarking software to check write speed due to U3 partition on drive, but in a physical test, copying a single 350MB file to drive took 41 seconds, giving an average write speed of 8.5MB/s. The following screen shot shows results from extended HD Tach speed test:

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The other great feature of drive is that it is compatible with Vista's Ready Boost system, which gives PC with extra high speed system memory. Some features of your computing experience, like boot times, will not be enhanced with Ready Boost, but other tasks, like using memory-intensive applications where heavy paging happens, can see big developments, so it is good to have this characteristic available just in case it is necessary.

The size and high read or write speeds of Cruzer micro also mean that you can install an operating system, like Linux or Windows XP onto drive and boot a PC from flash drive instead of from system drive. Some extra system configuration and a non-standard install to drive will be essential to make use of this feature, and U3 want to be removed from drive before this will work.