Copying SATA to Flash drive on 3.0USB Port too slow?

[itakey]

I'm copying files from an internal SATA 5900 RPM (I think) drive to a USB flash pen drive on a 3.0USB port and its copying at a steady 6.80 MB/second.

Isn't this super slow?

 

[TemjinGold]

Are you using a USB3.0 flash drive too? Or is it a 2.0 drive in a 3.0 port?

 

[Glaring_Mistake]

Well, not all USB 3.0 flash drives are created equally.
In fact many may struggle to achieve even USB 2.0 speeds.

But without you saying what flash drive you're using or what type of files you're transferring it is difficult to do anything but guess as to why it has such low write speeds.

 

[Soulkeeper]

Yeah, most of the USB flash drives on the market perform poorly. Reads tend to be faster, but the writes are often crippled due to the limited nand channels and lower quality nand used.
6.80 MB/second Don't surprise me, i've got an older one that does about that.

 

[Topweasel]

Yeah that sounds about right. I mean I have some pretty decent ones (well the family worked great until two 64GB ones crapped the bed) and even they only do about 30mb writes even though they hit 120mb reads.

There are some really good almost SSD speed ones out there though. I have been eyeing a lexar that is about 250MB/s read and 150MB/S writes.

Also have to remember a lot of little files will transfer slow than 1 big file.

 

[Glaring_Mistake]

There are some really good almost SSD speed ones out there though. I have been eyeing a lexar that is about 250MB/s read and 150MB/S writes.

Something to keep in mind however is that even though they may have high sequential read/write speeds that read/write speeds for small files are often not so good.

 

[Topweasel]

Something to keep in mind however is that even though they may have high sequential read/write speeds that read/write speeds for small files are often not so good.

Which I pointed out two lines below that.

 

[Glaring_Mistake]

Which I pointed out two lines below that.

I saw that as being a more general statement.

All flash drives would slow down with small files, but just how much can vary a great deal from one flash drive to another.

To show you what I mean:

If you just looked at the speed of sequential transfers you wouldn't know that they would perform so differently when dealing with small files.

 

[itakey]

Thanks for the replies everyone. Now that I think of it, it is a USB 2.0 drive. It just seemed so darn slow as it was copying, and it took a long while. Strange though, I tried it in a different computer and it was much faster. I wonder if the first computer has some sort of bottleneck in the motherboard and the usb ports or something.