Fast USB thumb drives?

Can anyone recommend a thumb drive with a sustained write speed of 20MB/s+ (or close to it)?

I'm really sick and tired of drives that max out around 6MB/s. They might as well not have more that a couple of gigs of free space, since writing 10GB+ is a total PITA.

Oh, Bruno, you're just spoiled. You're probably not old enough to remember how exciting it was when quad-density floppy disks came out that let us write a whole megabyte (and a bit more!) to a single disk, and it only took a bit over a minute to write it. And other than a tape drive, that was the ONLY removable storage option there was.

Ahhhh... the good old days.

These days, in a bit over a minute you can write onto a $4 device the size of your thumb enough data to fill a stack of floppy disks four feet tall, and you complain about it. Tsk, tsk, tsk...

Heh, heh.. I used to back my whole computer up to floppy disks, wondering what would happen when, in the far distant future, there might be hard drives as big as a whole gigabyte for big companies that could afford the many-thousand-dollar price tag such a device would command.

tanstaafl.

I started using 5 1/4 floppy disks on a PET circa 1981.

I'm spoiled by my NAS and SSD where I can transfer files over my network at almost 100MB/s.

My computer in 1981 had a 30gb removable storage...

...that was a DEC LSI-11 with removable hard drive packs. Each pack was the size of a large hat box...


If you keep a glass of good wine near by, the time it takes to write to the flash drive won't seem so annoying...

The glass of wine doesn't work so well when I have to dash out the door with the desired contents on that flash drive.

Well, to get speeds like that you're looking at USB3.0. If you google for USB3 thumb drives, you get a lot of comparative reviews by people who care about speed -- most of which speed you'd also get over USB2.

For instance, this review lists several thumb drives that can write a 4GB ISO in ~160s over USB2, which is 25MBytes/s. And twice that fast over USB3. Though I haven't tried any of them personally.

Peter

Thank you for the link Peter, it was perfect. Patriot Supersonic Magnum FTW.

The odd thing, is the oldest USB flash drive I have is still the fastest one in the collection here. It sustains about 28MBytes/sec writing, over USB2. And that 2GB device is close to 10 years old now. I forget the brand/model, and it was discontinued years ago anyway.

I have a ton of newer, slower sticks around, many of them freebies. Of the modern-ish ones, I've got a couple of Sandisk Cruzer drives (very retro stainless styling and a slick click mechanism) that manage around 20MBytes/sec writing.

Flash drive or novelty condom? Hard to tell!

The key to write speed for SSD/USB thumb drives is pretty much the same as hard drives. Stripe them for better performance. The difference is that SSD/thumb drives can achieve striping internally with multiple chips. The more individual flash chips in the device, the more it can distribute and not have to wait as long for the previous write call.

Odds are that older 2GB thumb drive has a few NAND chips in it, whereas modern ones may only have a single chip.

Thanks, Tom. Any thoughts on how one might tell if a drive has this? I must admit to being disappointed with most of the thumb drives I have, and I have one I need to update constantly with the latest tools I use for my work.

Maybe the trick is to buy a 2.5" ssd and install it in a portable enclosure.

Without taking it apart, probably not. Your best bet is to look at benchmarks.

Yep, pretty much. Also much like hard drives over the ages, flash chips are getting physically smaller, and faster too. Without opening the unit and looking up numbers, it's hard to tell. Even if you get a clear case thumb drive, it may not be easy due to chip stacking.

Sure about that? 30MB maybe...

Regarding the original request:
http://www.techau.tv/blog/review-lexar-jumpdrive-triton-usb-3-0-flash-drive/

USB 2.0 will slow you down significantly too. It seems USB 2.0 tops out at about half the raw data rate of 480Mbps.

I always thought the speed difference between older and newer flash drives was the use of SLC versus MLC memory.

Maybe that is true, but when I went and looked I didn't find a USB 2.0 drive that went much faster than about 30-35MByte/sec. The raw data rate of USB 2.0 should be 480Mbps or 60MByte/sec.

Obviously there is overhead so you'll never see all of that but I would have thought it would be better than 50-60% of the theoretical maximum.

Yep, 30mb. I did have two, tho...

Right, if that was the case that would mean it was terribly badly designed... oh.

There are limits in the USB2 standard on how often you can service any one endpoint, even if it's the only active one. Someone who was on some of the committees told me that this wasn't what they meant, but it's what they wrote, and so that's what got implemented. USB3 is better in this regard, not just because the overall bandwidth is much higher, but because the channel-occupancy rules are less silly.

Peter

It's a half-duplex connection, with a scheme that resembles token-passing, and a kinda polling rate of 1000 times/sec. Add in command overhead and CRCs etc, and I'd expect a 480mb/s physical layer to yield perhaps 2/3 of that number in actual throughput for mass storage.

Which is just about exactly what it does. Cool.
On a commercial device that I wrote drivers for at both ends of the cable, we maxed out at about 35MBytes/sec.

Cheers
-ml

I don't think I've ever seen an external USB2 hard drive (regardless of model or the speed of the actual drive), with speeds above 30MB/s on a desktop-based copy. Usually they top out around 28-30. In my experience, USB is next to useless for large data transfers unless you're willing to go away for the weekend - or at least go to sleep for the night.

But if I could get close to 30MB/s with a thumb drive that would make me super content.

That is another factor, but not one really common in the consumer world (SSD side). SLC prices kept most devices locked to the enterprise market.

Not really sure what the breakdown of SLC vs MLC is for thumb drives. My guess would be that SLC didn't make much of a difference on USB2 devices.

Intel now is moving more towards MLC in general, even for their enterprise products. More focus is on making MLC faster and more reliable these days, due to the lower cost and higher capacities. Building a support structure with more DRAM and better controllers for MLC is still cheaper then building SLC devices.