Hello all. I have an USB pendrive (Mr.Flash U172 - 1GB) and I have found out that it's ANNOYING SLOW when writing to it. According to technical specifications it can handle 10MB/s-9MB/s reading/writing speeds but not on my machine. Reading isn't that bad (about 7-8MB/s) but when it writes it does it at crawl speed (no more than 2,1MB/s). Any clues? I have already changed the disk directive to enable write caching on the removable drive. Connected to a working USB 2.0 port (almost 20MB/s when using an external usb 2.0 hard-disk). Drive formatted using FAT32 with 4KB clusters (it doesn't make no difference). My board is an ABIT NF7 v2.0 (nVIDIA nFORCE2 chipset - drivers up to date). I am using Windows XP SP2 (up to date).
Actually, the read and write speeds of any flash memory drive are often quite different. The read speed is always faster than the write speed. In addition, the actual read and write speed depends on the SIZE of the files you are transferring. Small files will tax the flash controller while large files will tax the flash memory. So, they may rate the drive with a write speed of 10MB/s but that may only be for large file transfers which allow the flash memory chip to achieve its full potential. When writing small files, you will probably find a much lower write speed. Write caching won't actually help improve performance. What it does is merely cache all writes to the flash drive so that it appears as if the transfer is done. But what really happens is that the transfer is still continuing in the background. If you use write caching, you should not remove the flash drive unless you are absolutely sure the transfers are over, by checking the activity LED or by using Windows XP's Safely Remove Hardware utility.
