Which is faster - writing to memory stick or hard drive

[sonoferu]

I just had a big problem with my second hard drive, which I mainly use for just plain storage, but one specific thing was to make a Ghost image once a week, of the boot drive. I restored from the ghost a couple of times, big life-saver.

I ended up reformatting the second drive and it seems ok now, but I wonder - it doesnt feel very secure.

Now that flash drives are up there at 32 and 64 GB [my ghosts have been in the high 20's] I thought if I ghosted to a flash drive it would be better.

But would it be really slow? I did a simple test right away, I put 3GB of data on the newly formatted drive and ghosted it to my 4GB flash drive, and it took about 20 minutes, so 30GB should take maybe 3 to 4 hours. Ghosting to the second drive has generally taken a little less than an hour [I do the highly compressed option] So maybe that's a good enough indicator.

The drives are Seagate ST380011A UltraATA 100.

Memory stick is A-DATA PD7 4GB USB 2.0. In the specs it said 20MB/sec write speed. Is that megabytes or megabits?

And now that USB is at 3.0 would that be worth considering? What does it require on the computer? Are there special drivers to load, and I have a 4-port USB card, would that just make a 3.0 run as 2.0?

Of course, I can just let it run overnight and the time wont matter so much

 

[corkyg]

Which is faster - writing to memory stick or hard drive?

Answer - hard drive. Memory stick is constrained by USB. USB 3 would be faster, but still not equal to a SATA HDD,

Your existing 4-port card would run as USB 2.

MB=megabytes. Mb=megabits. Specs are often misleading - based on short burst rates, not sustained throughput.

 

[sonoferu]

OK - MB and Mb

So I can presume that the specs for any flash drive [like at Newegg] would be careful about that.

And the 20MB/sec on my ADATA drive should have let it write 3GB in about 2 - 3 minutes and it took 20

That helps the understanding, thanks

 

[Blain]

So I can presume that the specs for any flash drive [like at Newegg] would be careful about that.

No...
Vendors are in the business of selling goods not providing the most accurate data on those goods. They do what they can, but mistakes are bound to happen for one reason or another.
You should rely on the information provided by the actual manufacturers.

 

[0roo0roo]

usb 3 is fast...or can be. they are hardly going to give you ssd for flash disc price. but still some of the usb3 ones are good enough when on ly doing sequential rw.
but at that price you can buy a tb drive that is also fast.
usb 2 is 30 or so mb sec. megabytes that is. not particularly good.

 

[0roo0roo]

http://www.everythingusb.com/super-talent-usb-3.0-express-flash-drive-18519.html
meh

 

[mfenn]

Just keep using your HDD. Any USB memory stick that isn't essentially a fully-fledged SSD (with the pricetag to match!) is going to be really slow.