Every year, USB flash drives get cheaper and hold more data. Unfortunately, they don’t always get faster. The reality is, many USB 3.0 flash drives aren’t noticeably faster than their U…
I’ll be your fanboy for the day. I blame Windows for the slow down. If I move a file to or from a flash drive on windows the transfer will slow down to kilobits. This does not happen to me on Linux.
Windows prefers to deactivate or minimize the write cache on removable devices, most of the common Linux distros generally don’t make such changes. Microsoft has a very good reason for that default: not a lot of people actually use the “safely remove hardware” option and if the cache is enabled, using and waiting for that is a hard requirement for the data to have actually made its way onto the drive.
I haven’t tested the drive in question (no Microcenter near me), but I just replaced a cheap drive (from BestBuy) because it took almost an hour to write a 16GB Linux ISO (openSUSE Aeon in this case) on Linux (tried both dd and Impression) and the ISO didn’t actually work. I’ve used smaller ISOs in the past (DVD-size) and those worked, but were pretty slow (took several minutes to write).
So I got a different drive (Sandisk Ultra Go or something, also from BestBuy for $15 or so) and writing took a couple minutes or so, writing at 100+ MB/s, and the ISO worked completely fine. Same OS, same tools, different drive.
I’ll be your fanboy for the day. I blame Windows for the slow down. If I move a file to or from a flash drive on windows the transfer will slow down to kilobits. This does not happen to me on Linux.
Windows prefers to deactivate or minimize the write cache on removable devices, most of the common Linux distros generally don’t make such changes. Microsoft has a very good reason for that default: not a lot of people actually use the “safely remove hardware” option and if the cache is enabled, using and waiting for that is a hard requirement for the data to have actually made its way onto the drive.
Capitulating to the lowest common denominator, what else is new
I haven’t tested the drive in question (no Microcenter near me), but I just replaced a cheap drive (from BestBuy) because it took almost an hour to write a 16GB Linux ISO (openSUSE Aeon in this case) on Linux (tried both
ddandImpression) and the ISO didn’t actually work. I’ve used smaller ISOs in the past (DVD-size) and those worked, but were pretty slow (took several minutes to write).So I got a different drive (Sandisk Ultra Go or something, also from BestBuy for $15 or so) and writing took a couple minutes or so, writing at 100+ MB/s, and the ISO worked completely fine. Same OS, same tools, different drive.
It very much depends on the drive.