Super Talent RAIDDrive 64GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive Review

Temperature and Power Consumption

When using the Super Talent RAIDDrive we quickly figured out that this little USB 3.0 Flash drive gets pretty dang hot! We were seeing outside case temperatures in the 60-62C temperature range at both idle and load! That’s 140F for those in the US that don’t use Celsius yet! We heard rumors that USB 3.0 Flash drives were slow to come to the market due to heat issues and those rumors appear to be true.

After seeing the high external case temperatures we figured there would be a measurable power difference with the drive plugged in the system and we were correct! The Super Talent 64GB RAIDDrive USB 3.0 Flash drive was pulling five Watts of power from the looks of things. This helps explain why it gets so hot and remember it has two SATA controllers inside, a bridge chip and the 64GB of MLC NAND Flash! The USB 3.0 specification lets devices draw up to 900 mA when attached to a host, which is significantly higher than the 500-mA limit set by USB 2.0. It looks like this drive uses some of that extra power draw!

We asked Super Talent to confirm our power consumption numbers and they measured 3.85W and likely used a higher-end test equipment that is more accurate than our Kill-A-Watt power meter.