trparky
Bite My Shiny Metal Ass
Premium,MVM
join:2000-05-24
Cleveland, OH
clubs: | USB Flash Drives
I'm looking for a good USB Flash Drive that's at least 16 (32 would be nice) GBs in capacity but has fast write speeds. All drives I've seen so far have had less than stellar write speeds.
Any suggestions?
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Tom |
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pandora
Premium
join:2001-06-01
Outland
 ·ooma
·Future Nine Corpor..
 ·Comcast
| I think some of the limitation is USB 2. In the near future we should have USB 3, and we may get faster flash drives. I have 1,2,4,8,16,32 and 64 GB flash drives. Overall I prefer the 64GB flash drives, as they hold just about everything I want. However it takes a long time to fill them. The price on larger flash drives seems to have gone up in the past 6 months.
I'd like to purchase a few 256GB flash drives, but am waiting for USB 3.
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"People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use." |
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koitsu
Premium
join:2002-07-16
Mountain View, CA
| reply to trparky
Can we get some numbers that define what "fast" and "stellar" mean in this context?
I've done benchmarking on Sandisk Cruzer Micro drives, on both Windows and FreeBSD, as noted here:
»lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/free···271.html
I haven't benchmarked my HP, Corsair, and "no name generic who-knows-what" USB flash drives, but I'm willing to bet the numbers are more or less the same.
The write speed is not a result of USB 2.0 speed limitations. Read speed, however, definitely looks to be (given USB protocol overhead, ~30MB/sec is about right, maybe a little on the slow side).
With regards to write speeds: I'm fairly certain the flash itself is either slow, or the microcontroller used on the USB flash drives for I/O interfacing is slow (e.g. cheap). These devices also have no form of cache on them (to keep the cost down), so that's likely impacting things as well.
If you want to increase the write speed in Windows -- at least XP (haven't looked at Vista and W7) -- by a smidgeon, you can re-enable write caching on your USB flash drives by going into the Device Manager, under "Disk drives", do a Properties on the drive, go to the Policies tab, and select "Optimize for performance". Note that by enabling this feature, you absolutely will have to use the Safe Removal stuff in the systray when removing the drive, else you'll have filesystem/data corruption on the drive.
Hope this helps.
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Making life hard for others since 1977.
I speak for myself and not my employer/affiliates of my employer. |
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trparky
Bite My Shiny Metal Ass
Premium,MVM
join:2000-05-24
Cleveland, OH
clubs: | Are there better brands than others? Are there faster flash drives out there?
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Tom |
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koitsu
Premium
join:2002-07-16
Mountain View, CA
| reply to trparky
I haven't seen any evidence of them, but my guess is that a better microcontroller and hardware cache would improve I/O. If someone makes such a product, it likely costs significantly more (I'm guessing US$100+) than what people expect for a USB flash drive.
There's a general overview of the "disappointing" situation here:
»www.codinghorror.com/blog/archiv···127.html
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Making life hard for others since 1977.
I speak for myself and not my employer/affiliates of my employer. |
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aurgathor
join:2002-12-01
Lynnwood, WA
 ·Verizon west (ex G..
| The write speed is usually determined by the flash chips. There are some twin/dual channel USB pen drives that are faster than the others. Not sure why, but no one came out as yet with a quad channel USB pen drive.
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And the winner is: |
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trparky
Bite My Shiny Metal Ass
Premium,MVM
join:2000-05-24
Cleveland, OH
clubs: | Any recommendations of a flash drive with a dual-channel controller?
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Tom |
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Martinus
Premium
join:2001-08-06
EU
| reply to trparky
said by trparky  :I'm looking for a good USB Flash Drive that's at least 16 (32 would be nice) GBs in capacity but has fast write speeds. All drives I've seen so far have had less than stellar write speeds. Any suggestions? Corsair Flash Voyager GT.
Their current USB drives are not as fast as their 1st. generation ones due to they are now using MLC. SLC prices made them prohibitive. More info here.
But they are still the fastest and most reliable USB drives I've gotten my hands on. And if I remember correctly, they have lifetime warranty. |
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