Memory stick too slow

It's probably got a wimpy flash controller and needs to keep waiting for it to erase and/or move blocks.

I thought Toshiba was the bee's knees (though not when it comes to building power stations).

Is there a way of testing the controller? Does a slow controller make the memory stick any less reliable for long-term storage? It is only used as a backup.

They've spun-off and renamed their storage division as Kioxia, presumably after some little-known greek god with a good memory?

No, it's all hidden within the device behind the USB interface, but such a 16GB stick is under £3 nowadays, likely to be cut to the bone. .

Not really.

I see that, now made in Japan rather than the Philippines. Will this affect build quality?

Putting it a different way, can the be jaloused from the specification?

Good, thanks. I'll just use them anyway as long as they work.

My brother is in IT. When he worked for a bank (which he declined to name) they placed the faulty tapes in a bin to use as backups.

Only accept benchmarks.

SanDisk Extreme PRO 128 GB Solid State Flash Drive, USB 3.1(Gen 1) £49.58

While you can expect good results at first, sometimes in mid-life, fast products like that only write at 100MB/sec.

The graph with the "row-row-row-your-boat" behavior, that could be thermal throttling, where inside the USB stick, it's getting a little warm. It's either that or the stick is using an SLC cache for the TLC flash, and that isn't likely on a USB stick. That's more of a SSD thing (to give deceptively good numbers at first, but not for the entire drive).

Some of the cheapest schlock, has that pulsating write behavior even when the stick is ice-cold, and this is a sign of a really bad controller. Nothing you can do about it in that case. I have my share of those here.

Toshiba makes BICS flash. They have their own plant for flash chips. Whether they still own the plant or not, I don't know.

The controller chip, on the other hand, it could be theirs, or it could just as easily be manufactured by a third party. Just because a company (like Micron) makes flash memory chips, they don't necessarily have any interest in making USB controllers.

In the department store here, there is *nothing* on the USB flash stick section, having merit. It's all 10MB/sec write flash.

The USB3 baseline behavior is 100MB/sec read, 10MB/sec write. That is what you might expect if the advert has no mention of the speeds at all. And for the junk sticks, nobody bothers to post a CrystalDiskMark for them. Writing a large capacity stick, like say a 256GB, at 10MB/sec, is pure agony. Imagine if you did a PC backup (a disk image) and tried to store it on such a stick. You would come back the next morning and find it had not finished.

The CrystalDiskMark has 4KB random writes, which is a tough test for NAND flash, since the block size of the flash is much larger (say, 64KB). If you write 4KB, maybe you need to read-modify-write a segment of flash, which would be slow going. This also means, that writing small files can be agonizing.

Say you had a folder with 5000 files in it. You could use your ZIP program, to ZIP up the folder and store it as folder.zip on the USB stick. That would allow one 64KB write after another, and the USB stick could perform faster. But the resulting ZIP is not all that convenient. Some versions of Windows Search look inside a ZIP for you, but not all do that.

With the current parts shortages, there is substitution going on when consumer items are produced. This means that today, you can't really trust a CrystalDiskMark, unless there is some knowledge of the age of the batch. Expensive sticks don't sell all that fast, but on the other hand, they likely don't stock a lot of them.

And fraud is a concern with these things too. Like the

Paul

Did it work all right before you formatted it? Maybe it doesn't like NTFS. Usually they come with FAT32, which is all right unless you want to save 4GB+ files.

I think it was the one that was slower than the others, but I have managed to mix them up. I don't think the problem is NTFS as other identical sticks work okay with NTFS. I find NTFS faster to eject, which is why I prefer it. Also, I did once have a file that exceeded

Supposedly they hold of erasing(TRIM?) until they're out of empty blocks. so either throw them away after filling them up once or go slow.

could be other things too.. filesystem features, metadata, journalling... etc... bugs... broken usb ifc...

Normally I find it is the port its plugged into which is too slow not the sticks. However I have had issues with ntfs formatted sticks, If you go fat

I'd definitely make sure its in one of the fastest ports on the machine as many still do have original usbs which are fine for keyboards and mice but useless if you want to copy data at anything like a reasonable speed. Brian

That sounds like an accident waiting to happen then. Toshiba have more or less gone from computing, as they are almost broke. Brian

USB1.1 Practical transfer = approximately 1MB/sec USB2.0 = 30-35MB/sec (better with UASP) USB3.0 = 200-450MB/sec (depends on system bus config)

And that's really sufficient to cover the most common transfer cases.

Paul

My problem is that the ports at the front are USB2 and the rear of the PC is inaccessible without lifting out the PC.

You could fit a pci-e USB3 expansion card that has internal connectors and then link these to front-panel sockets in a spare drive bay. If that isn't possible, use a short USB3 extension cable to bring the rear-panel sockets to an accessible position.

John

Or even USB3 hubs which are now a more sensible cost.

But is the O/P's stick USB3?

Having access to multiple USB 3 ports can only be a positive.

It doesn't matter if the OP's stick is USB 2, it will still fit a USB 3 'A' socket. According to the OP, if nothing much else will be attached to this port, there's a good chance it won't be sharing bandwidth with any other device.

My USB3 ports are also inaccessible, but I use a short USB extension cable to bring one to the front

Regards wasbit.

I don't possess a USB3 stick but a USB extension lead bringing a USB3 port to the front, allows convenient use of things that require just a little more power than USB2 can supply, such as my Canon LIDE 300 scanner, without a powered hub. It also charges my wife's mobile phone faster than plugging it into a mains adaptor.

Regards wasbit