Every year, USB flash drives get cheaper and hold more data. Unfortunately, they don’t always get faster. The reality is, many USB 3.0 flash drives aren’t noticeably faster than their USB 2.0 cousins, as [Chase Fournier] found with the ultra-cheap specimens purchased over at his local Micro Center store.
Although these all have USB 3.0 interfaces, they transfer at less than 30 MB/s, but why exactly? After popping open a few of these drives the answer appears to be that they use the old-style Phison controller (PS2251-09-V) and NAND flash packages that you’d expect to find in a USB 2.0 drive.
Across the 32, 64, and 256 GB variants the same Phison controller is used, but the PCB has provisions for both twin TSOP packages or one BGA package. The latter package turned out to be identical to those found in the iPhone 8. Also interesting was that the two 256 GB drives [Chase] bought had different Phison chips, as in one being BGA and the other QFP. Meanwhile some flash drives use eMMC chips, which are significantly faster, as demonstrated in the video.
It would seem that you really do get what you pay for, with $3 “USB 3.0” flash drives providing the advertised storage, but you really need to budget in the extra time that you’ll be waiting for transfers.
The quality of the firmware also varies widely. I’ve seen some real abominations over the years.
do you have examples?
This is one of the reasons USB is terrible for reliable storage, though bugs have also been found (even recently) in linux USB drivers.
eMMC being faster is odd though. In the end, flash is flash, eMMC uses nand flash internally as well, its just packaged differently with an integrated controller…
It’s the inefficiency of the controller. With eMMC memory management is pushed to the controller in the Flash chip. With regular NAND Flash, the external controller chip is doing all the work (with hardware assistance), and the microcontroller is often just a 8051.
eMMC is better in just about every way. Better quality, better controller, better design aimed at a higher spec, better firmware with better algorithms and better wear levelling, the list goes on. This is why eMMC when used with a raspi is often far less fragile than an SD card. It’s simply received more attention and care.
I have had the privilege of running full Windows XP off of early USB “disk on chip” products. Everyone should have to go through that before complaining about USB flash drives.
Sandisk Ultra Fit, USB 3.2 Gen 1 Flash Drive. – Absolutely tears-it-up! (400MB/s Read)
Aren’t they 130 mb/s?
I got the 128GB and this size (and above) do the full 400MB/s. Maybe you’re thinking about the 16GB that does 130MB/s (mega-BYTES per second)?
You’ll be astonished!
What I don’t like about these drives is that they get insanely hot and you could almost burn yourself on it
Yes, were they not shelled entirely in plastic, including the connector tube, then burn you they would.
About ~80mA regardless of activity when ‘running’, and then it ‘spins-down’ to ~30mA after ~2-minutes. Max 0.4W, yet a tiny package.
Transformative performance. Most USB3 host controllers in use today support it’s USB 3.2 Gen 1, potentially 5 Gbps, transfer rate. Supposedly fall-back compatible, but that’s where I got caught.
Count your blessings. At least they aren’t onn pos that can overheat and disconnect trying to manage usb2 rated speed.. be it large single file, reformat, or many small file. Thought transfer throttling write it might be okay as a readonly bootloader drive, but no, even then. I cut losses after trying a second unit to see if it was a one off lemon the first go around.
Meanwhile 12+ year older 8gb micrometer usb2 drive still muddles along just fine. Slow reliable beats “maybe” pretty much everytime
I have noticed some get slower as time goes by. As slow as 5mb/s
Oh well, what do I know 😉
A 256 GB USB stick with 30MB/s takes:
seconds to fill, which is over two hours. This is atrocious, and whenever I go shopping for an USB stick, the transfer speed is for me more important then the price.
Also, beware that write speed is often significantly slower then read speed, so if only read speed is mentioned, I do not buy it, but move on to the next. There are plenty of models to choose from. I just did a short check, and Kingston Datatraveler claims 900MB/s write, and 1000GB/s read speed, and it is not even among the more expensive variants.
Sometimes I wonder if these things would be reliable enough to put your backups on. I’m not sure if you can still read the data from these things once they’ve been lying in a drawer for 10+ years. At the moment I still use HDD’s for my backups.
I may use an ssd as a mirror but never as a long term primary backup (that honor still goes to spinning rust). I’ve already had a handful of ssd’s corrupt data from electron tunneling while stored in a cool/dark drawer for the good part of a decade. As with anything important, you still need to check backups every once and awhile, try to follow rule of threes, and migrate to newer/better storage mediums as they come out.
SSD’s are very bad for long term backup. Apparently these things start loosing data after about a year when they are not powered. Apparently, SSD’s have some internal algorithm that shifts the data around a bit every now and then to prevent long term loss through leakage.
I found this site recently.
https://ssd-tester.com/usb_flash_drive_test.php
After comparing some of the results it doesn’t look correct, some USB drives have better read/write speeds but are given a lower score…hmmm….
I have had countless numbers of these over the years and the thing that always stuck out to me was the incredibly high failure rate of the drives. I’ve also had weird things happen like a 64gb drive after some use will suddenly only show as a 32gb drive, like have the flash storage just boiled away.
That’s what made me buy a Transcend ESD310C 🔥🔥🔥
I find the cheap and sometimes free Microcenter flash drives pretty decent for just general small file transfers and they make decent Ventoy drives. I was given most of the ones I have for free with other purchases.
When it comes to transferring larger files I usually either use my Samsung USB type C flash drives (not sure about the model number, but it’s 128GB with SATA SSD performance. Then, I’ve got a few M.2 SSD enclosures with 1TB drives in them. Those have a 10Gb USB type C connection and have nearly the same performance as an internal NVMe drive.
Of for those times when you need to give some files to some friend/coworker, and chances are whatever media you used will not be returned.
I use portable SSD, and portable and desktop HDD drives for backups and such. Much faster, reliable and of course a bit more expensive.
However thumb drives do have their place as they are great to put a few files on and hand-off to a friend or co-worker. If you don’t get it back, no biggie as they are cheap. I really have no need for over 64G drives for these type of transfers. Use is a lot like we used to do with floppies and then CDs before the flash thumb drives came out.
“and of course a bit more expensive”
I’ve seen 1TB spinning rust drives being given away on Craigslist. HDDs have become insanely cheap. And external drive enclosures are under $20. I have multiple copies of all my critical work as it’s so cheap and easy to do anymore.
That may be true, but I always buy ‘new’ for my needs, as you never know how hard a ‘used’ drive has been driven. So for me, a Samsung T7 or portable 4TB HDD WD drive is more expensive than a thumb drive. But worth the piece of mind :) .
They haven’t become all that cheap unless you’re talking about small size HDDs. Most people don’t care about anything under 1TB (and arguably 1 or 2 TB) HDDs because of prices. But prices on larger HDDs (8TB+) have actually INCREASED over the past year or so.
Ventoy and bootable installation media are my main use for drives under 32gb.
I Forgot about that use… Bootable media. Use them too for installing Linux.
I use them for konboot. They work great for that.
I use them for Konboot, they work well for that.
Who cares? Why is anyone using a USB thumb drive for anything requiring a high throughput rate? If you need high rates, then buy a drive that handles it. If you want cheap, then expect cheap. I use MicroCenter drives. Storing ISO images to boot, giving offline data to others (not often cuz I use Dropbox or Gmail, or…), cheap backup (and I don’t do that anymore; I use a USB SSD for that).
Any decent microSD card + any cheap thumb-sized microSD card to USB3 adapter will be faster than nearly any USB thumb drive you come across. Think about the reasons why that is the case now and it’ll become obvious. You’re welcome.
I bought a cheap USB memory on AliExpress (I was buying two things on their buy-three thingie and couldn’t find anything else) half expecting it to be fake. I ran F3 and it passed!
Some time later, I tried to actually use it. The write speed turned out to be 0.5 MB/seconds…
At least yours were cheap. I needed a drive quick and the office store pricing is a joke, so I ended up paying like $12 for one of the garbage tier 20MB/sec “USB3” drives. Which was REAL nice since I wrote a like 60GB firmware update ro it. Bonus, IT FLIPPED A BIT in one of the files. Luckily I futzed with rsync inplace option so it only rewrote a like 128KB section of the file instead of having to copy the whole thing over.
Some of the Kingston 512GB drives they sell on amazon are straight-up frauds; the speed drops to the point where it’s completely unusable once you get past about 10GB, and I don’t mean unusable for an impatient person, I mean on a geological scale. Someone could do with checking those.
I have had multiple MicroCenter flash storage devices fail. MicroSD and USB. Won’t trust them with anything important.
Dude missed the point, those drives are all over alibaba. If you order min 10k, they’ll slap your logo on it.
I lived before 2010, so things being ‘slow’ are irrelevant, if anything I just use these things for temporary storage.
However, I get the argument that they are ripoffs. However, at what price would they be sold anyhow?
I use the 64g microcenter drives as a one-time monthly cold backup. Once a month, my server creates a LUKS encrypted file system on the drive, and then dumps a copy of mission critical files, revision control trees, etc. This gets written, and at some point in the month, I take the backup drive out, put a new one in, and dump the drive in a box to be never used again off-site. In this case I don’t care about the transfer speed, and if it has a 50% reliability rate, the worst case is I lose a one month snapshot of something that already has 3 other backups.
Unpowered NAND loses data over time. It would be wise to check your backups.
Ummm.. let’s do some probability. 50% failure rate means 25% chance two months in a row fail. 12.5% chance three fail. Backups are important. Treat them well.
Slow reading, writing, or both? I regularly use Micro Center microSSD cards to routinely record 2K HD video in dashcams and drones, and haven’t had any issue.
It’s like my grandma always said, “Ya buy shit, ya get shit.”