Solved USB pen drive slooooowwww...

[JorgeO]

Hello,

I have Sandisk's pen drives in 8 GB and 16 GB capacities. Writing is slow, but this maybe their speed class. Both are NTFS formatted.

What really bothers me is that in the last few MB Windows states it will take 5 seconds to finish but it takes more like 5 minutes....

CPU is i3 540, 8GB RAM, Intel MOBO, Win 7 Ultimate, latest USB drivers.

Thanks for your help.

 

[Skylais]

Try searching for device manager on your version of windows 7, open that go to disk drives find the USB right Click then to properties enable better performance write caching. May help, but FAIR WARNING - when taking out or ejecting the USB while write caching is enabled, you should Safely remove hardware. Must do every time in order to prevent data loss. Should look like this

 

[JorgeO]

Thanks, Skylais, but write caching is already enabled.

 

[Skylais]

OK, how much data is being transferred and whether you are sending data to the computer or flash drive? At what speed or rate is it transferring? As well if you can get your hands on another brand USB stick and try to transfer the same data, checking for a significant speed increase, decrease, or if it stays about the same. I am sure you have USB 2.0 ports so there should be no problems when it comes to that
As well you may want to try placing the stick in different USB ports on your computer. Please post back

 

[JorgeO]

I'm transferring video files, in the giga range. Transfer (writing to the pen drive) starts ar some 60MB/s then decreases as cache is filled up, by the end of transfer it's about 5MB/s.

That's where the problem starts - Windows states there are a few meg (5~10) to transfer, 5 sec to finish - and it takes minutes.

Changing USB port didn't help at all, the same with another brand Pen Drive (Kingston).

I'm starting to think there may be a bug in MS caching algorithm.

 

[kado897]

Many pen drives have a write rate of 3-5MB/sec it can get even slower if a lot of small files are being written.

http://usbspeed.nirsoft.net/

 

[Skylais]

well 1st the USB will say its starting around 60 MB/s but that is the fastest a USB can possibly perform, and theoretically around 40 MB/s. Writing USB 2.0 is usually a lot slower then reading, by a lot. For example :write speed range = 4-10 MB/s read speed range = 15~25 MB/s.
Writing should be somewhere around 4.02 MB/s possibly a bit lower, at least on the 8GB version, reading should probably be around 18 Mb/s. I am actually only getting about 4MB/s using a Toshiba 16 GB stick transferring about 4 GB of data.
I want to say your speed is normal, and windows 7 Algorithm is a bit wrong. Try using this : TeraCopy for Microsoft Windows - Code Sector
it may help your speeds, possibly. Post back if it does please Otherwise your write speed is actually about normal, although i will say on other operating systems like linux and mac the transfer rates are much faster than windows i am going to look into this further.

 

[JorgeO]

I know writing at about 5MB/s is normal (the Kingston went to 8MB/s).
What is not normal - and I'm looking for a solution to it - are the last 5 seconds, 5MB of data that becomes like 5 minutes.

I will take a look at Teracopy.

 

[Skylais]

try teracopy, and windows lies to me as well. When finishing the last couple of megabytes, it also tells me about 3 seconds remaining and takes almost a whole minute to finish

 

[JorgeO]

Ok, Windows fault, then. One more - I tried to disable write caching - it won't.
I shall be using Teracopy.

 

[Skylais]

Ok, In NTFS format it always runs write caching try formatting the sticks to fat 32 or Exfat (i think Exfat will do better, although i use Fat32). You then can go to device manager select the USB driver and switch to quick removal or write caching whichever suites your needs most. Oh this also might fix your original problem Fat file systems are more designed for USB and usually run faster. Also when formatting i suggest putting the highest allocation size possible This will help A tiny bit with speed as well.
Also try downloading the hot fix attachment to this post. If you already have the fix it will tell you, and no harm will come to your computer.

 

[kado897]

USBDeview has a speed test function for USB devices.View any installed/connected USB device on your system

 

[JorgeO]

Skylais

The pen drives are used to transfer data to a player that will only read FAT16/32 or NTFS, so other format options are not a solution.
I've compared the full transfer time of Windows and Teracopy (including the last "5 long seconds") and they are about the same, so I will leave it as is.

kado897

Thanks for the clues.

 

[kado897]

You are welcome JorgeO.