Will USB ever be replaced by something that isn't such a hog? Edit: It was the laptop

[Ketchup]

Sure, the speed has gotten very good, BUT:

Was copying a 4 GB file from my laptop to my flash drive this evening (USB 3.0 interface). I don't use my flash drives much, at all, so I was blown away how everything on the computer seemed to stand still. Took forever just to do some web browsing or start up Outlook at the same time.

Oh, and as Windows does, it looked like it was giving a good speed, but stayed at the end FOREVER!

So what gives? Is it just the bus they are allowed to use?

Edit: must have been the laptop, as the desktop handles this with no issue. See post 14.

 

[readymix]

Nope, not really. That's doing 1 to 1 1/2 GB backups 2 to 3 times a week either on a desktop or notebook.

 

[cruzinforit]

Your issue sounds more like you are using a non SSD drive and expecting it to not slow down when you are heavily reading from it for semi long periods of time. I do not have this issue on any of my computers.

 

[greenhawk]

Oh, and as Windows does, it looked like it was giving a good speed, but stayed at the end FOREVER!

So what gives? Is it just the bus they are allowed to use?

The staying at the end is a sign of buffering occurring.

 

[LTC8K6]

I've never noticed such a slowdown.

 

[Ketchup]

Your issue sounds more like you are using a non SSD drive and expecting it to not slow down when you are heavily reading from it for semi long periods of time. I do not have this issue on any of my computers.

The hard drive is barely been accessed.

 

[Ketchup]

The staying at the end is a sign of buffering occurring.

Yep, gets me every time, lol.

 

[Ketchup]

I've never noticed such a slowdown.

What size files do you copy? Little ones are fine. Honestly, it was a big file, and after a few seconds (15 or so, I didn't cont) I could continue what I was doing. I am sure if I had apps already open, it would have been fine.

 

[Mantrid-Drone]

Could the slowdown be caused by anti-virus or other protection software rather than specific problems with the USB or flash drive? If it was me I'd be using Process Hacker 2 to see what was using up all the resources if the slowdown was significant.

I do monthly manual backups of everything which include some fairly big folders and I've noticed two things:-

1). Certain flash drives (USB 2.0 in USB 2.0 ports) I use are very much slower to write to than others. I have two which are noticeably slower than even when copying stuff to my external USB HDD, an old IDE one.

2). No other processes seem to be slowed down that much. If I'm using the PC for other things it is the USB copying speed that slows down to a snail's pace not the other programs.

That's what I would expect to happen.

 

[AlienTech]

Speeds depend on the flash drive, USB3 flash drive speeds for writes go from 10mb to 200mb range. SOME pen drives have a very hard time with randow files AS nand has to be accessed sequentially and takes a long time to change blocks. Another problem is, pen drives garbage collection is not very good and it takes even longer to erase a block to write data. Simple cheap pen drives basically use cheap controllers that does nothing while the expensive ones uses the same ones found on high quality SSD's. I got a PNY USB3 drive and it gave read speeds of around 150mb and writes of around 100mb's.. Sequentially reading or writting was nto a problem, But then copying 100 small files would just stop the computer and you could see each 10k file taking 5-10 seconds to copy. These drives can not be used for like editing and such where a file is changed in the middle. OR for downloading torrents etc.. The speeds might look okay, but random access and latency would be huge.. PNY now has 128GB pen drives for $30.. Not a bad price.. But the pen drives which will actually work properly cost more than SSD's.. IE a 128GB pen drive would cost around $100..

 

[LTC8K6]

I will run a test later with a 3gb file. I have a c2d laptop to test with.
IIRC the cpu utilization while benchmarking a flash drive is not very high.

 

[LTC8K6]

Using USB 2.0 and transferring a 3.8gb file to a PNY USB stick, T8300 4gb ram, I don't notice any slowdown of Win 10 at all.

Not sure this is a useful comparison to 3.0, though.

 

[Sabrewings]

I have the same issue with some computers on Windows when burning a disc. I don't think it's USB's fault as much as Windows in general. I can copy terabytes of data over USB3 without noticing it's even happening while doing other tasks.

 

[Ketchup]

It was the laptop. It's got an i7 and 8 GB of RAM, but it just couldn't take it. Thanks for the input all.