No Transfer-Rate Information for some USB Pen drives!

[michaelg]

How do manufacturers get away with selling pen drives without publishing any transfer-rate specifications? I am pretty sure the ones without published specs are the slow ones, but it would be nice to know how slow! At first I thought it was Scan being lazy, and not bothering to put the all-important transfer rates onto the website, but then I went to the manufacturer's site, and even their own so-called "data-sheet" doesn't give the speed! (Kingston DT108)

Scan, how about pressuring your suppliers to provide transfer-rate specifications, as these are second only in importance to the storage capacity?

[doyll49]

I agree read / write speeds are as critical as capacity on these things.

Google "flash drive roundup" and there are some read / write specs. available.

[scaryjim]

tbh, the vast majority of people who buy and use USB pen drives don't care about transfer speeds, they just want to know how many songs/pictures/dodgy videos they can store on it.

Bottom line is: if you want a specific transfer rate, then shop around for drives that publish their transfer rate. If all you want is somewhere to stick files, don't worry about it!

[doyll49]

\ If all you want is somewhere to stick files, don't worry about it!

Stick running at normal r/w speed is too slow if it's over 1GB. Typical 8GB stick will take 45 minutes to load.

Yeah, they would rather set and wait 10 minutes for a not too large file to load onto stick

[Pob255]

Recently my 2gb usb stick died and I started looking around for a fast drive only to find the same thing.
There are a couple of websites that do look at speed or I should say did, because most are not up to date.

With the emergence of USB3 that's probably your best bet, most of the USB3 drives do give speed data, they are backwards compatible with usb2 although most will be bottle necked by it as their transfer rates are higher than usb2 can do, well read any way most are slightly under max usb2 speed for write.
Theoretical maximum speed for usb2 is around 60MB/s however practical data transfer speeds tend to max out around 30MB/s on usb2
The USB3 corsair voyager GT http://www.scan.co.uk/products/16gb-...s-write-21mb-s will max out read and come fairly close on write

Next step up is the kingston data traveller ultimate usb3 http://www.scan.co.uk/products/16gb-...s-write-70mb-s
cheaper on amazon http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B005039I6...A3P5ROKL5A1OLE
This is going to be bottle necked by USB2 on both read and write

If you really want to go high end then the super talent RC8 http://www.scan.co.uk/products/25gb-...-write-240mb-s this thing is basically a mini SSD using a sandforce controller to get the high speeds, but the cost of the 25gb version is around £90 and it's hard to find.

[DanceswithUnix]

Another vote for going USB3 for flash drives.

I don't have any USB3 interfaces on any of my PCs, I just don't want them to utterly suck on USB2

Last ones I got were the Ebuyer Extra Value 8GB sticks. Only wanted 4GB (for copying ISO DVD installs onto) but at about £6 each at the time these 8GB ones were the cheapest they had. In real life use I don't think they max out USB2, but they don't suck.

OTOH, ebuyer were advertising a 64GB really slow USB2 drive the other day for £22. For plugging into a TV for time shifting, that would rock. For transferring files? That's 3 hours to get the files on, and another 3 to get them off at the other end. Almost a whole working day

[doyll49]

3 hours if everything goes right.... and at least for me it never seems to.

USB3 sticks are best way forward. Will be checking ebuy for a few. Thanks.

[scaryjim]

Yeah, they would rather set and wait 10 minutes for a not too large file to load onto stick

tbh, most people would, yeah. But then, loading 480MB+ of files onto a USB 2 stick in a time constrained situation isn't a very common use case (and that's a worst case file size, you could comfortably be talking 1.5GB depending on file type)!

Pretty much everyone I know who uses USB sticks uses generic USB 2.0 ones and is happy with the performance, because they tend to use them to transfer a few small files between computers, or to back up data in which case they don't care how long it takes because they'll do other stuff whilst it's backing up. Besides, if you know your use case is going to involve regularly transferring GBs of data to and from your stick, then you probably want something faster than a generic USB2 stick anyway - at which point the lack of data transfer rate information becomes irrelevant!

[doyll49]

USB flash drive. What a misnomer.

Actually I want something small and fast.... USB stick fits the bill.. if it's a fast one... for several things; Video files and software installs mostly. USB sticks are much nicer to use the DVD or CD. My video library DVDs are boxed up and user library is on HDD. As soon as I get DVD I rip it and store on HDD. Want to take movie to friends to watch.... USB stick. Same with software. load on a stick and install on whatever system.

Yes, most everyone using USB stick are using generic or brand names that flood market... Kingston, SanDisk, etc. When sticks were 2GB and smaller the speed wasn't much of a issue, but now with sizes of 8, 16, 32, and even 64GB out there most buyers don't realize that speed hasn't kept up.. not even close to what USB2 is rated at. They think USB2 is the speed... the speed they see sticks in TV and movies loading files for spies. They think of loading a stick like burning a CD. 5-10 minutes and it's full... or like using an external HDD on USB.... And then they are rudely awoken by how long it takes to load their new 8GB stick.

[Pob255]

Besides, if you know your use case is going to involve regularly transferring GBs of data to and from your stick, then you probably want something faster than a generic USB2 stick anyway - at which point the lack of data transfer rate information becomes irrelevant!

But that's the point, even non-generic flash drives have lost their data transfer rate data (it used to be there) you can find it on usb3 drives now, but I don't know of any usb2 drive that still has that data listed.
Currently the only way to find out which is the fastest usb2 drive would be to buy lots of them and test them out yourself.

Luckily brands are now making a big thing out of the usb3 drives speed, so they are including the data, however without usb2 data as well thing can get a bit misleading
eg the corsair voyager (Plane, not GT) has some pretty crippling write speeds http://www.ebuyer.com/287755-corsair...ve-cmfvy3s-8gb
most 1-2gb generic usb2 sticks will be able better that speed.

[Agent]

Yeah, it's a nightmare. I've had the 'same' drives a few months apart that have vastly different transfer speed between them.

My current method is a fast SD card - any of the Sandisks are good, although buy from a known retailer like Amazon (and not one of their sellers). Pair this with a good reader, you can get small USB3 ones for about ten quid like the Kingston MobileLite G3 Card reader.

Very fast and the reader can be used when you buy a new bigger card later on.

[michaelg]

Pretty much everyone I know who uses USB sticks uses generic USB 2.0 ones and is happy with the performance, because they tend to use them to transfer a few small files between computers, or to back up data in which case they don't care how long it takes because they'll do other stuff whilst it's backing up.

I think the variation in replies bears out my point somewhat - most people care to some extent how long it takes to transfer files to and from a USB stick, and there's really not much excuse for keeping that information secret! It obviously makes more difference for larger capacity sticks.

And these days, "transferring a few small files between computers" would often include a few gigabytes of video. It's only a few minutes, but the speed of the stick might easily halve or double the time taken. And the price variation between faster and slower sticks isn't that great (except perhaps at the extremes).

It would just be nice to be able to make an informed choice!

[doyll49]

It obviously makes more difference for larger capacity sticks.

It would just be nice to be able to make an informed choice!

Need to take a 3GB file with me and am setting here waiting while it takes 12 minutes to load onto 8GB stick. Could FTP it faster if my broadband was even 50% of what they claim it to be. "Up to 20Mbps is really .8Mbps.... yeah. 800kbps.