PEN-Drive issues/questions

[Natascha Heumann]

Hi,

I recently buyed two pen-drives (1 Hyundai 4GB and a Seagate 5 GB).

Both of them I show strange behaviour:

- copy to the Pen:
it takes a couple of seconds (almost 10 or more) before the progress
bar of my file manager goes froward.

- deleting a file on the pen takes also a couple of seconds.

Why is that?

I was under the inmpression, that the pen ic actually a hard disk
connected via USB to the computer?

 

[R. McCarty]

Pen or Thumb drives are constructed from Flash Memory chips.
They will always have some "Lag" when deleting content because
of the erasure process. Natively, they have very short (Good)
access times - usually under 8.0 mS. But, the data transfer rates
aren't that particularly good, averaging around 10 Megabytes per
Second. This compares with newer IDE or SATA drives that can
easily reach & sustain around 55 Megabytes a second. Remember
their main feature is portability - no where will see claims of any
kind of stellar performance from them.

 

[Anna]

Pen or Thumb drives are constructed from Flash Memory chips.
They will always have some "Lag" when deleting content because
of the erasure process. Natively, they have very short (Good)
access times - usually under 8.0 mS. But, the data transfer rates
aren't that particularly good, averaging around 10 Megabytes per
Second. This compares with newer IDE or SATA drives that can
easily reach & sustain around 55 Megabytes a second. Remember
their main feature is portability - no where will see claims of any
kind of stellar performance from them.

Mr. McCarty (& Natascha):
Note the Hyundai & Seagate drives are mini-HD powered, not flash drives like
the typical jump or pen drives, so Natascha is correct in that they're
miniature USB-powered hard drives.

Haven't had much experience with them - only worked with two (not Hyundai
nor Seagate) in the 4 GB & 8 GB range as I recall, and we did find them
slightly slower in performance than the "usual" flash drives, but not unduly
so. They seem to be sturdy devices, but hard to say how they'll hold up over
the long run.
Anna

 

[R. McCarty]

Thanks for the correction, I thought when I read the drive size that
they were "Very Large" for typical Flash Drives. I don't how it would
compare, I have a Firelight USB Mini drive (40. Gig). It's access time
is not great at 20.0+ mS and it only averages around a sustained data
transfer of just under 18 Megabytes a second. Of course I use it for
customer data images/transport so speed isn't a big deal for it. To get
a little more performance I format it with FAT32 and use 32KByte
sized clusters.

 

[Unk]

Hi,

I recently buyed two pen-drives (1 Hyundai 4GB and a Seagate 5 GB).

Both of them I show strange behaviour:

- copy to the Pen:
it takes a couple of seconds (almost 10 or more) before the progress
bar of my file manager goes froward.

- deleting a file on the pen takes also a couple of seconds.

Why is that?

I was under the inmpression, that the pen ic actually a hard disk
connected via USB to the computer?

A USB's data rate is typically 12 Mbit/sec.
An IDE's data rate is typically 100 Mbit/sec.

 

[Plato]

I was under the inmpression, that the pen ic actually a hard disk
connected via USB to the computer?

Incorrect. It's just ram chip. No hard disk in there