USB transfer speeds question

[perdomot]

I was transfering a folder with a large number of photos(590MB) to a USB thumbdrive and observed that the average transfer speed seemed to be about 300KB/s. Am I wrong in thinking this is too slow? The drive was plugged into the cases front usb ports and the mobo is an AMD 780G type. I've heard AMD usb speeds aren't the best so I wanted some feedback. Thanks.

Moved to appropriate forum - Moderator Rubycon

 

[perdomot]

More info:
I transfered a 170MB video file to my thumb drive with both front and rear usb connections and got a transfer speed of 2.9MB/s. This is well short of the 30MB/s average I've found in several articles reviewing mobos. Tried another drive and got 2.4MB/s.Hope some one can help.

 

[bobsmith1492]

It's more likely a question of the thumbdrive speed as opposed to the motherboard or USB interface. Also this question would be best for General Hardware or Memory and Storage.

 

[perdomot]

I'll try posting it there as well. The thing is, I took the thumbdrive to work and copied the pics off the drive in less than a minute. I know read and write speeds can differ but I don't think the drive is responsible for the low rate.

 

[Mojoed]

Most high capacity thumb drives write painfully slow. This is your bottleneck, not your USB. I have a bunch, ranging in size of 8-32GB. Write speed varies anywhere from 2.5MB-9MB/s on large video files. It can be substantially slower copying smaller files.

As far as copying files from a flash drive to a hard drive goes, 30MB/s sounds about right.

Read speeds are much higher than write on a flash drive. Everything you've experienced sounds completely normal to me.

 

[soccerballtux]

Originally posted by: perdomot
I'll try posting it there as well. The thing is, I took the thumbdrive to work and copied the pics off the drive in less than a minute. I know read and write speeds can differ but I don't think the drive is responsible for the low rate.

It's the drive. Reading is much faster for various reasons. The poorly designed flash drives (IE the cheap ones most people settle on) have poor controller implementations and thus have slow write speeds.

 

[blahblah99]

The $10 4GB usb thumb drives aren't going to support the 30-100MB/s speeds you read about on the hardware test results.

 

[IHateMyJob2004]

Also keep in mind that USB tech is hub based. Meaning that bandwidth is shared among all ports. So if you have other USB devices attached, they will effect performance.

 

[WHAMPOM]

Your USB throttles down to meet the thumb drive write speed. Read and write can be 10X+ different.

 

[vj8usa]

Originally posted by: perdomot
I'll try posting it there as well. The thing is, I took the thumbdrive to work and copied the pics off the drive in less than a minute. I know read and write speeds can differ but I don't think the drive is responsible for the low rate.

The simplest thing to try is just to read the files off of the thumb drive on the home computer you're concerned about (or to write stuff to the drive on the work computer). I'm betting the drive just isn't capable of writing much faster than 3MB/s.