Fast Flash Drive Recommendations?

[struggle4progress]

I sometimes need to move stuff back and forth between home and work

Tried this yesterday with about 3.5 GB of data on a 4 GB flash. Writing at home took about 15 min. Got to work and set out to copy the files onto my work HD. The estimated time for the read/copy was about 4 hours. Ouch!

[RoyGBiv]

1. Hrrmmm ...

That may not be a problem with the flash drive. Could either be the port being a USB 1.1 standard or a slow hard drive or some variation of that.

The systems where I work virus scan every file that is accessed on a flash stick. Could that be the issue?

[struggle4progress]

2. USB standard might be the issue: it's an older machine. Virus scan probably isn't the issue:

the virus scan occurs on mount; for obvious reasons, I didn't cancel it but waited until it completed before attempting the file copy

[hobbit709]

3. Sounds about right. USB 1.1 is slow

I've always been able to read a flash drive much faster than writing to one.

[IDemo]

4. Writes will always take longer on flash memory regardless of the IO

Flash writes are initiated by first 'erasing' the memory block(s) by writing 1's. The data is then written by filling in the 0's where needed.

A SATA based device will give you much quicker bus speeds than USB 2.0, but the actual memory write speed will remain the same.

http://www.techchee.com/2008/12/09/ocz-throttle-e-sata-flash-drive-triples-the-speed-of-usb-flash-drives/

[hobbit709]

5. I use an 8GB Throttle as the boot drive

on my 8-track Digital Audio Recorder setup. Writing/installing took almost as long as writing to USB, but reading is quick. The box goes from POST to desktop in 10 seconds. Made a 5Gb partition on a 40Gb notebook hard drive to hold the swap file and use the other 30+Gb for writing the recording data.

Mini Itx case with Atom 330 motherboard, 1Gb RAM, M-Audio Delta 1010LT audio card. I use a USB external DVD-RW with it. Complete audio recording setup I can carry around in a shopping bag.

[pokerfan]

6. USB 1.1 was one of the reasons I decided that it was time to upgrade

That and moving to SATA.

Transferring 250 GB of data from the old machine to the new machine was no picnic.

[hobbit709]

7. If I have to copy that much data

I just take the old drive out of the old box, plug it into the new one as a secondary drive and let her rip. Then you can always put it back in the old box when done.

[pokerfan]

8. and normally I would have done exactly that

as I've done so many times in the past. But my old machine was EIDE and the new machine is SATA. So instead of plonking down $20 for an adapter that I would likely only use once, I suffered through the slowwww transfer to an external drive.

[hobbit709]

9. all the newer motherboards I've seen still have one IDE controller on them.

[pokerfan]

10. not this one