I bought a sort of cheapie flash drive on ebay, and I notice that when writing to it using Terra Copy, it only runs at about 2MB/s. This means it can take over an hour to fill its 32MB.
What is a respectable write speed for flash drives? Is it possible that Terra Copy is a limiting factor? Would buying a name brand drive improve this?
What are you copying? Is this one big contiguous file? A bunch of files will always be much slower to copy than one large one.
USB flash drives aren’t engineered to be fast. Theyre made to be cheap and disposable. Your speed is on the slow end of things but not too atypical. There are a few fast ones out there like this OCZ Turbo:
Ummm…if it runs at 2 MB/s, it would fill 32MB in 16 seconds…I assume you mean its capacity is 32GB?
It sounds like you only have a USB 1.1 port, not 2.0 (1.1 writes at about 1.43 MB/s, USB 2.0 is about 57 MB/s.)
Edit: And is there a reason yoiu’re using 3rd party file copy software instead of just Windows Explorer?
Its probably not USB1.1. The limitation is probably how fast the media can write. Flash media on these super cheap drives is pretty lousy. I bet if he plugged in a USB drive that had a mechanical disk in it, it would fly.
BTW - I would be VERY careful about buying large Flash drives on ebay - Many (most?) of them are fakes. Get a drive tester and confirm that your drive is as big as it says it is, before trusting your data to it!
I’m using Terra Copy because it will skip overwrites in bulk, and especially because it will skip corrupted or in-use files without stopping the entire operation.
However, I’m getting corrupted data. I don’t know if it’s the drive or Terra Copy. I’ve not had problems with TC using the HDDs I have. I’m getting the feeling this flash drive was either cheaply made is an actual reject.
Sounds like your USB drive is made out of a crappy SD card. A real drive is going to be 20x faster.
This is what it is, probably from the same seller, even.
Huge differences in flash drive write speeds. Better ones are about as quick as good hard drives. slow ones take forever. Look at www.newegg.com comments for best performing units.
I used Teracopy about 18 months ago, and in fairly short order identified and submitted a bug report for a case where using it would result in data loss. I can’t remember the exact circumstances, but the TeraCopy bug listing is pretty big, and pretty old. I don’t think they’re interested in fixing things really.