USB Memory sticks: Slower under Windows 7 vs. xp?

I'm wondering if this is a "problem" or just a mere characteristic. Fairly modern mobo using intel's mobile 910/915 chipset and Pentium 4 Mobile running 1.8ghz... I have a big 8GB memory "stick" that uses an SD card. its awful slow... just dreary painfully slow to use. Is this "normal"?

I notice that a Geeksquad 2GB stick with that stupid little OS of theirs taking up space is actually much faster than the bigger SD thingy. Its not FAST,... not like my Seagate Free Agent usb drive, but its easily 2X faster than the SD.

tips? tricks? driver issue?

ok.
had certainly not thought of that.

So one is a SD card and the other is a 'regular' USB flash drive? I think there is a big speed difference between USB flash and SD cards - that might be it.

Wouldn't a defrag on the drive shorten the lifespan? They have limited number of writes and a defrag does a lot of writes. That is one of the reasons why Windows doesn't auto defrag drives it detects as SSD. they have the same limited number of writes (less then the normal USB stick i think but that might be wrong).

Plus a defrag would not help a flash drive much, they have really fast response times (again with SSDs). So fragments don't slow them down as much as mechanical drives.

but i wouldnt worry too much about the life of the drive, with millions of writes it might die but by the time a replace drive of the same size might be really cheap.