Flash drive benchmarks

I wonder if anyone can point me at reliable benchmarks of measured
flash memory performance?

Or recommendations based on first hand experience with the larger
drives. 8GB, 16GB.

I found the following URL with some older drives in the 1-2GB range
tested with h2benchw 3.6, but AFAICT there is very little else out
there with real measured performance figures. I am interested in
buying the largest USB flash drive I can get consistent with still
getting around 20MB/s data rate for read and the lowest possible
random access seek time. I don't care much about the write time as I
only expect to write the data once. Cheaper is obviously better. (and
I am hoping it will be a lot quieter and cooler than a 10k rpm
spindle)

The benchmarks that I have found are summarised on Toms Hardware page:
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/data-t...w-1305-10.html

All of the drives reviewed there are too small for the data I need to
store. My bog standard no-name 1GB manages 12MB/s read rate and that
is too slow for what I want to do. It is also much too small. The seek
time is also important as I expect the vast majority of accesses to be
uncorrelated and random.

I was considering the Corsair 8GB or 16GB basic blue units, but I was
a bit alarmed at the apparently slow ~30ms random access time shown
for their smaller drives cf others like Kingston, Crucial and Memina
in at around <1ms. I have also seen a couple of user reviews where
people said the 16GB unit was much slower than the 8GB - but they may
have been mistaken since others seem not to have a problem.

This isn't for Vista so I don't care at all if the drive is readyboost
compatible or not.

Thanks for any suggestions or enlightenment. I don't like buyng a pig
in poke.

Regards,
Martin Brown