programming and human factors
by Jeff Atwood
I woke up a few days ago and realized I was still carrying the same 32 GB USB flash drive on my keychain that I purchased in 2010. I thought to myself, this is an unacceptable state of affairs. Totally. Unacceptable.
It's been few years since I seriously looked at USB drive performance. Premium USB flash drives typically eke out about 10-20 MB per second, strongly favoring reads, but I've recently purchased a number of inexpensive 4 GB USB drives that barely got to 4 MB per second. That's OK, since they were only intended as cheap floppy drive CD and DVD replacements. Based on that experience, I wasn't expecting much improvement in the status quo.
USB 3.0 is finally becoming somewhat prevalent on PCs and Macs, so I figured I'd:
I checked around and the Patriot Supersonic Magnum got good reviews. The price seemed about right at $75 for a 64 GB device. So I bought one. I plugged it in to one of the USB 3.0 ports on my PC and …
Holy. Crap.
237 MB/s reads and 143 MB/s writes? Yes please!
Needless to say, this thing handily saturates a USB 2.0 connection at around 27 - 30 MB/sec but plug it into one of those blue USB 3.0 ports on newer Macs or PCs and prepare to feel like the "blown away" guy in the Maxell ad.
I haven't run a full set of benchmarks on this guy, but the only downside I've noticed so far is that it is a bit chunkier in width than my previous USB flash drive. It might be a bit more to carry, and might not fit some USB ports depending on what's adjacent.
Now I feel like a total dork for continuing to carry around a 2010 era flash drive that I thought had decent performance at 20 MB/sec. Forget that noise. Now we can darn near carry pocket solid state hard drives on our keychains! Nobody told me, man!
So now I'm telling you. Enjoy.
| [advertisement] What's your next career move? Stack Overflow Careers has the best job listings from great companies, whether you're looking for opportunities at a startup or Fortune 500. You can search our job listings or create a profile and let employers find you. |
Them's chunky numbers sure enough. Just a shame that USB3 ports are still relatively rare.
Is the 'installing device driver' and 'safe to eject' malarkey still just as slow and clunky with USB3? It strikes me that as transfer speeds get higher latency involved in just getting the thing readable and then off the machine after a transfer gets ever more incongruous.
juux on November 13, 2012 12:33 AMWow, cool. Almost makes me wish I went back into the dark ages of keeping around actual media on my own computer!
Srikiraju on November 13, 2012 12:49 AMWow, those numbers. I didn't know that was possible with USB 3.0. Taking a 1.76GB file and transferring it in just under 10 seconds? Phenomenal!
I'll have to take a look at one of those Supersonics. Luckily enough for me, my laptop has one USB 3.0 port. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure everything else I have or come across on a daily basis has all USB 2.0 ports, so can't take that awesome speed everywhere.
The reviews on Amazon do say that for smaller files, like JPEG photos, the transfer speed is a lot slower, but 30MB/s is still much faster than USB 2.0.
Roberto Sanchez on November 13, 2012 1:00 AMGerman amazon comments are about some negative points:
- Fast with big files, slow with small files
- Opening Windows Explorer gets slow when stick is attached to PC
(The second point may be related to bad driver for USB 3 on Gigabyte GA-970A-UD3 mainboard)
Whats your experience?
St3fan_de on November 13, 2012 1:03 AMJust retired an old laptop with some sw I wanted to keep. 32gb usb3 drive, disk2vhd and virtualbox made my day. Runs even faster on my new hw too. #win
Jens Jonsson on November 13, 2012 1:36 AMApple would never do something as visually tacky as use blue USB 3.0 ports. The ports are the appropriate color for the given Mac. For instance on the new mini, they are charcoal to match the rest of the back plate, while on the Macbook pro, they are a tasteful silver.
Glenn Howes on November 13, 2012 1:39 AMRun CrystalDiskMark on it. Its a low tech performance test that will show you the random reads as well as the sustained transfer speed. While the sustained transfer speed is what a lot of people look at when it comes to SSDs in practice the random performance at 4K is what makes them feel so much faster than a HDD.
SSDs are only 5x faster in big transfers, but 100x at random access. My problem with USB 3.0 in general has been the generally poor random IO performance, it costs quite a lot of performance to convert to USB 3.0 instead of just using e-sata.
Paul Keeble on November 13, 2012 1:59 AMSorry for being pedantic but shouldn't the title be "An SSD in your pocket", assuming it's read as an acronym and not "Solid-State Drive"?
Abdurrahman Patel on November 13, 2012 2:10 AM“An” SSD in Your Pocket.
Just saying...
> it costs quite a lot of performance to convert to USB 3.0 instead of just using e-sata.
Wow, I already had USB 3 thumb drives...but I think you are right, if I go look for an eSATA one, which my laptop has a port for, it will be another performance leap. I carry around full development setups on drives to help out at hackathons and the like.
LanceNanek on November 13, 2012 4:26 AMWhat a timely post! I was reading your 2010 post just the other day as I weighed the options while looking for a new flash drive. I haven't purchased anything yet, so I will definitely take your quick review into consideration!
Justin Bennett on November 13, 2012 4:45 AMWow, that's awesome. You know, when USB3.0 motherboards and drives become commonplace, this will open up a whole new possibility which is (to this day) pretty unexplored... you could easily fit a virtual machine on that drive and carry around your own PC in a pocket. When you get to work - just plug it in the stationary machine there, and voila - you're just where you left off at home. Perhaps the next generation mobile devices will be usable in the same fashion, since they already have an USB port and a built in memory. In fact, you could probably build some kind of "seemless sync" on top of that - basically your phone would be your entire workspace, but when you plug it in your PC via a traditional USB, you suddenly get all the same stuff on your PC that you have on your phone, plus all the power of the PC.
Vilx- on November 13, 2012 5:00 AMI've always been limited by IOPS rather than bandwidth on my USB 2 flash drives.
Sometimes, it can get really bad, something like <10 IOPS, which is terrible if you want to copy photos or source code.
There's also a limitation on the number of simultaneous IO (but that may be caused by drivers) : sometimes you can't delete a file while copying another...
How does this device perform in that respect?
Michaël BROUTIN on November 13, 2012 5:32 AMNow all you have to do is install this on it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_To_Go
Chris Hampson on November 13, 2012 6:29 AMBah, Chris beat me to the "Windows To Go" comment.
This may be pretty cool that you can transfer stuff this fast onto something that fits in your pocket, but putting your stuff on a gigabit network and transferring files that way has been around for ages with nearly the same speed.
I'm pretty sure that as WAN speeds are catching up to that, and internal networks will soon be going to 10Gb, the need for any removable storage at all will be almost zero in no time.
D on November 13, 2012 7:51 AMThe numbers are amazing, surely. But if you don't have an OS in your flash drive, how rarely are those numbers going to affect your file transfer time? 2 seconds to 1 seconds?
Hezi Hertz on November 13, 2012 8:24 AM@Glenn Howes: I know you're just trolling, but Apple changing the color is actually a violation of the USB 3.0 specification, which makes the connector color Pantone 300C. But hey, all in the name of shiny!
Bryan Boettcher on November 13, 2012 8:50 AMI prefer smaller dimension over speed when using USB thumb drive. The only thing that will prompt me to buy fast thumb drive is Windows To Go. It's a slick concept but I never need it. Btw what is the life time of this when you are writing a lot?
Nyet on November 13, 2012 9:15 AM@Glenn Howes: I know you're just trolling, but Apple changing the color is actually a violation of the USB 3.0 specification, which makes the connector color Pantone 300C. But hey, all in the name of shiny!
You should try reading the specification [29mb zip], Section 5.3.1.3, which says that color-coding is "recommended".
Note, not "required".
Since the justification given in the standards document is that it helps users tell one apart from the other because they may co-exist on a host, it's easy to see why Apple didn't - because every Mac is either "no-USB3" or "all-USB3".
So, by "a violation of" you should mean "in compliance with", given that the color-coding is in fact optional.
This is only a preview. Your comment has not yet been posted.
As a final step before posting your comment, enter the letters and numbers you see in the image below. This prevents automated programs from posting comments.
Having trouble reading this image? View an alternate.
Subscribe in a reader
Subscribe via email
|
|
Traffic Stats |
Posted by: |