Very Slow deleting from USB thumb drive.

[audiorob]

Hello group - I've just transfered nearly 1 gig of files from my thumb
drive to my PC hard drive via USB 2.0 port and the transfer was
pleasingly fast. However, now I try to delete the files on the thumb
drive and the process is painfully slow deletes the files. What
gives? Why is it so slow deleting when the transferring (copying) was
so fast?? Watching task manager during the deleting process showed
very little use of CPU. I have a new 2.2 gig dual core processor.

Can anyone shed some light?

thanks,
Robert

 

[SliqM]

Try to swich off other usb devices, including the wireless component if
applicable...

 

[Uwe Sieber]

Hello group - I've just transfered nearly 1 gig of files from my thumb
drive to my PC hard drive via USB 2.0 port and the transfer was
pleasingly fast. However, now I try to delete the files on the thumb
drive and the process is painfully slow deletes the files. What
gives? Why is it so slow deleting when the transferring (copying) was
so fast?? Watching task manager during the deleting process showed
very little use of CPU. I have a new 2.2 gig dual core processor.

Can anyone shed some light?

XP has no write cache for FAT formatted 'removable' USB
drives. So, the deletion of every single file is written
separatley to the drive. Write access time becomes the
bottleneck here.

The only way to get a write cache for 'removable' USB
drives seems to be the NTFS file system. I've put together
some inforation about this:
http://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbstick_e.html#cache


Uwe