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USB Flash Drive Life Varies Up To 10 Times
Lucas123 writes "Differences in the type of memory and I/O controllers used in USB drives can make one device perform two or three times faster and last 10 times longer than another, even if both sport the USB 2.0 logo, according to a Computerworld story. While a slow USB drive may be fine for moving a few dozen megabytes of files around, when you get into larger data transfers, that's when bandwidth contrictions become noticeable. In 2009, controller manufacturers are expected to begin shipping drives with dual- and even four-channel controllers, which will increase speeds even for slower drives."
I assume the article is talking about flash drives. Are there any filesystems designed to specifically target these drives? The drives probably don't include any fault-tolerance, but a filesystem could, in theory.
I would, but since i've posted on this page, I can't.
And why are they mixing the two? It just confuses things.
I finally RTFA and it tells me to pay more for stuff!
Why is it every other media we have speed-ratings and benchmarks and reviews? With USB thumb-drives you can't tell virtually anything when purchasing one other than what color it is.
I want to know SOMETHING like 133x is defined for CompactFlash to give a basic idea of the speed of the device. I'm willing to accept some fudging around but not prepared to find out my new 32-gig flash-drive is 10 times SLOWER than my old 2-gig one. How has this situation persisted this long in a performance-obsessed technical field?
Someone asked me about this very thing last week.
I thought everyone knew that you get what you pay for, both speed and durability.
I have found also that the drives marked ReadyBoost usually mean they're among the faster drives.
Kriston
So, wait. Are you telling me that better quality products will perform better and last longer? You've blown my mind here! My whole worldview will need to be adjusted.
[insert witty quote here]
Speaking of flash drives dying, does anyone know of an MP3/whatever player that can use USB flash drives but is not INTEGRATED into one?
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
Then I copied a 700 MB file onto it from a local hard drive in gnome, which reported initially that it was transferring at 20+ MB/s, but that dropped steadily until it levelled off around 6.1 MB/s.
Far from scientific, yes, but I wonder a)why the inconsistencies, and b)how these results compare with other products.
db
I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
Always, when possible, submit a link to the print version. It's faster, on one page, and gets rid of those annoying frames, ads, etc. that litter most tech Web sites these days.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=printArticleBasic&articleId=9093718
I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
My biggest beef with flash drives thus far is with the flimsy construction. I have owned three flash drives. The first was a 64 byte drive back in the day when that was sizeable. I think it was an Iomega drive. It was really tiny which is why I liked it. But after only about a dozen gentle insertions (no jokes please), it developed a crack in the housing which soon threatened to cause the whole device to fall apart. Iomega was kind enough to replace it for free (it was still under warrantly, less than 6 months old) with a 128 Megabyte version. That was drive #2. I think I lost that one.
My next drive was a Patriot 2 GB flash drive. It lasted maybe 50 insertions before the usb connector "pushed in" and became so loose that it could no longer be inserted properly into a USB port. I ended up snapping the outer housing off and now it's just a little tiny PCB with chips on it and a USB connector at the end. Works fine but I wouldn't take it anywhere remotely hostile. I keep it next to my computer.
So what is the point of this long story? That flash drives tend to have really cheap construction (in my experience) that doesn't hold up to much use, let alone much abuse. In the case of the Patriot I'm not surprised because it was a really cheap unit. But the Iomega was not.
I don't doubt that th expensive ruggedized flash drives can take much, much more abuse. But they represent like 1% of the market. Most drives are these really flimsily constructed things that fall apart when you look at them the wrong way.
durability has a lot more to do with drive lifetime than the durability of the flash components. I have had 3 memory sticks die, and none of them have been because the flash wore out. One I managed to kick and separated the flash part from the USB connector(which was a bitch to get out of my mac pro), another the USB connector became very flakey right after I bought the thing, it would sometimes read, sometimes not, and the other just stopped working(ok, theoretically that could have been due to flash wear, but the thing was less than a year old). In my opinion, if reliability is a chief concern, get one of the small plastic ones. My little red iMation drive has took lots of abuse, and because it is so small, the odds of a collision are significantly reduced.
Monstar L
I installed Arch Linux on a cheap 2 GB Patriot flash drive. It boots pretty quickly and overall performance seems good, even for a cheap drive. However I don't do hugely disk intensive tasks with it.
/proc filesystem entries to turn more aggressive write cache flushing on. I can't keep up with the /proc filesystem because it changes so frequently, so I don't even bother to try to stay abreast of how to do things with the Linux kernel in this way anymore ...
One annoying thing I have noticed is that programs will periodically completely freeze up and I'll look over and notice that the activity light on the drive is flashing. A common experience is that Firefox will be completely unresponsive, not even redrawing itself when a window that was obscuring it is moved, until the drive stops flashing, and then Firefox will instantly come back to life.
My theory is that the kernel is caching writes to the drive and then at some random point decides it's time to flush the write cache to disk. I think that any program that tries to write any files while the kernel is flushing the cache gets put into a wait state by the kernel until the cache flush is complete and then whatever write the program was attempting, gets written into the cache, ready to be flushed again on the next cache flush.
Furthermore, I theorize that for normal hard disk drives, the write speed is sufficient to keep "ahead" of cache flushes so that the cache never really "fills up" and no programs ever get waited in this way.
But that for slowish flash drives like mine, the kernel doesn't compensate for the slow write speed of the flash (because the kernel doesn't even realize that it's writing to flash?) and so it lets enough data buffer up that it has to frantically try to flush it all when the cache has filled up. Or perhaps, that the kernel just tries to flush too much at once, not realizing how slow the flush is going to be due to the underlying speed of the device.
I also theorize that this problem could be solved by having the kernel flush the cache more aggressively, and in smaller increments. If the flash drive were kept continually busy flushing small chunks of write cache, then a) the write cache would not be as likely to fill up, and b) no individual write would monopolize the device for such a long period of time becase the writes are all smaller.
Writing all of this makes me realize that the root cause may be that programs are trying to *read* from the device while a write cache flush is happening, and since the device can only do one operation (read or write) at a time, the long duration of the cache flush operation is blocking a program from reading the drive. Furthermore, if what the program is trying to read is a demand-paged part of its text segment, then it makes perfect sense that the whole process would be blocked by the kernel while the text segment piece waits to be loaded.
Am I even close to the mark on this one?
If so, I am sure there are Linux kernel experts who can tell me what values to write into what
db
I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
I have always wondered why no one has mad a USB thumb drive with a flexible/swivel neck. Ive seen a few laptops with the USB sockets damaged after a user has connected the thumb drive then forgotten about it and then knocked it (thus cold soldering the laptops USB socket).
It's not the speed that matters, it's how you use it.... or something like that.
conStrictions
You were critically hit for no damage. The bruise will look nice, and maybe the scars will make good party talk.
It can't be an objection to its freeness (as in beer) or you wouldn't use linux.
It can't be an objection to its restrictiveness, or you wouldn't be using (or attempting to use) Windows.
And it can't be that the shareware license prevents that specific use of the software, because doesn't the Windows EULA stipulate against running Windows from virtual machines, mobile devices or while enjoying ice cream? Ok, just kidding about the virtual machine, I believe that restriction came about with Vista.
db
I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
Well, that's easy. See, if you have a painfully slow drive, you use it less. So it'll last you for decades ;)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Crappy products perform less, break more than good ones!
News at 11!
Hello! I'm a disaster waiting to happen!
... a bit of research on the internet, before you go out to purchase these things, will save you a lot of time, money and disappointment.
Also, buying a reputable brand (Corsair and OCZ are generally good).
When 8G flash drives suddenly dropped in price lately, I could choose between a Kingston and an I-Forget-The-Noname-Brand-Offhand at a local small retailer. I picked the Kingston. Installing Linux on it, something seemed terribly off. Reads were fast, but writes were deathly slow. I took it back and swapped with the noname brand, which was a bit smaller physically, and *much* faster in operation.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Latin languages doesn't have this problem, and there's no "free vs. free" ambiguity. Thus nobody speaking those languages has the impression that FSF is playing with words.
Besides, exFAT still costs money to the user, as Vista SP1's license explicitly requires that the user has bought a valid license for Vista, which almost never costs zero, except if the user got it through some channels as MSDNAA.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I know that compact flash for cameras varies in price and performance. The purportedly good ones get marketed as Ultra, High-Speed, etc. Interesting to note that there is a technical difference as dramatic as SLC vs MLC that could be cited, but I never recall it being touted as a selling point for high-end cards. One might not care so much about a thumb drive being fast and reliable given the use pattern, but if one is laying down images in a war zone, or in a ball game (or even in a delivery room) one kind of wants the best when the data are unique.
As someone who cares a lot about his pictures I would pay a premium for an SLC compact flash card or an SD card; that is, provided I was assured of the difference. To date I have gone for a high price on cards, but have not always gotten what I payed for. I think it would be worth it to out the specs of some of these cards. Some savvy marketer might do well by touting the SLC spec for some applications.
Anyone know about any compact flash or SD cards that use SLC?
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
ZFS works great with flash drives. For a video demo check out: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7760232806099469333 There is a english dubbed version of the video at http://blogs.sun.com/constantin/entry/csi_munich_how_to_save but I like the original german one better.
My Hello World is 512 bytes. But it's also a valid Fat12 boot sector, Fat12 file reader, and Pmode routine.
(And yes, I too have wandered down that sunny Day Dream avenue from time to time.)
You have to be about seven or eight years old, about six months after Star Wars came out and the best computer game available is "Pong" which takes up an entire counsel unit and is still pretty cool. Anyway, you have to show up one day at your friend's house or at school; some place where there's a handful of kids but no adults, and you have to have a modern laptop with you. You explain that it's a new Star Wars toy that they're testing but which hasn't "come out" yet, and that your Dad managed to bring one of the test units home from "the office". Nobody's sure if he really let you have it or if you're going to get in trouble when he finds out. Either way, that's incidental, because everybody is jostling to see what the heck it is you have on the table. It looks like it might have actually been IN a Star Wars film, that's for sure.
Then you crack open the lid and power it up, and muck around with the interface for a while. This should be sufficient to blow your audience away since things like GUI's and mouse pointers haven't been invented yet. --Flat screens which have better color and resolution than any TV set around are also new; just the sort of thing you'd expect a really expensive Star Wars toy to have. You might also want to pull the luminescent CD out of the Star Wars game package and put it in the extending CD tray. --Because Walkman-size consumer electronics have also not been invented, so just the size of the mechanics should also blow your friends away. Not to mention the Buck Rogers CD, (I still think the CD is a dead giveaway that we're all actually living in a low budget sci-fi movie of the week, but anyway. .
Then you start playing the Star Wars game. Music, sound effects, interface, it all looks better even than the best coin-op video game at the mall. A LOT better. You play this for about five or ten minutes, letting your friends have short tries before you suddenly have to go home because your Dad called and you need to bring the game back. And then it is never seen again. Until thirty years later, that is. --The stories which will circulate will not be taken seriously by parents, and yet a handful of kids will be jazzed beyond belief and will be scoping out Department Store Catalogs for the rest of their natural childhoods.
I had a friend who came back from Japan once with a fold-up robot toy which was lightyears ahead of anything our Western toy makers had ever produced. It was one of the coolest days of my entire life. I just picture that day times ten.
-FL
"Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand" - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Come on people, mod these funny. If you can't have a little humor at the expense of the moderation system, what good is /. ?
I don't waste mod points... I will sell them though, see my auction on ebay.
I had a voyager 1 gig a couple years ago. The one with the rubber around it. It wasn't "road ready" for my use. After 9 months of use, the usb connector pulled loose, and you could feel it wiggle around inside the rubber case. On the other hand, my old 256 gig sandisk "titanium" is still kicking. I recently bought the new 4 gig version. If corsair had one like sandisk, I would buy one. It was blazing fast.
I have a sandisk Cruzer "Titanium" drive. The casing is made of metal so it is a bit more sturdy.
http://sandisk.com/Products/Catalog(1167)-SanDisk_Ultra_Cruzer_Titanium.aspx
Why, yes I have been touched by His noodly appendage. And I plan to sue.
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-flash-filesystems/
This is anecdotal, so obviously have a side of salt with it.
I bought an 8GB Flash Voyager GT about a year ago. It died after about 5 weeks. Just *poof* light doesn't even blink, device not recognized. I spoke to Corsair about it and they said it's probably an isolated incident. I told them their feedback on Newegg was starting to show a few similar experiences. So they had me send in my drive for lab analysis to find out why it failed. They also gave me an 8GB Flash Survivor GT to replace it and said "Here, this one won't break." So far, it hasn't.
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
I can't speak for the 1970s, but I started developing for mainframes in the 1980s.
The mainframe I first worked on did NOT have a card reader, which was odd at the time for the series (NCR Criterion V-series). It had 1MB of memory per CPU, and the two hosts shared a bank of 6 disks, each 500MB (total of 3 GB).
Now, my laptop has a CPU with dual cores, 1GB of memory, and 160GB of disk. Oh, and my cell phone has a microSD card with 2GB on it that is less than my thumbnail size.
Apache with PHP and few PHP scripts (Drupal modules) start at 17MB, while that mainframe had a maximum of 16MB that could fit in it. One could run Linux with X11 and fvwm in 64MB comfortably. Now with KDE, kubuntu would not boot 128MB (or was it 256MB, can't remember).
15 years down the road we would be talking terabytes of storage in your key ring.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
I understand this thread is about USB flash drives. But I had something so strange happen in a USB drive that took enough time to diagnose that I thought I'd put it into the "Someone mentioned that" knowledge base.
So, FYI:
On two different brand motherboards using current AMIBIOS, having a USB disk drive device plugged in hung the machine early in startup, early in BIOS boot. I can't be sure where exactly, but it hung after displaying the size of RAM, but before displaying the SATA & PATA disks it found, or letting me press DEL to get into the BIOS settings.
This is pretty disconcerting because this is so early in boot, you can't check much with software, and it can look like bad hardware. That's what I thought it was. I was replacing hardware items one at a time when I first spotted a USB hard disk cable that the owner hadn't told me about and unplugged it, and tried the computer. It then booted.
Then this happened to me five weeks later. So this has occurred on both Intel and nVidia 750 motherboards. There's nothing special or trick about the setups. The only difference was that a hard disk was connected via USB. Interestingly, the hard disk was -not- selected as a boot device -- I triple checked that as the obvious first time.
I would have to suspect that the onboard USB controller comes up in a state that hangs the processor when (probably not all) USB hard disk(s) are attached.
I would not be surprised at all if some USB flash drives did this, since whatever signal or event is causing this hasn't been tracked down.
If anyone has suggestions on where I could forward this info to where it could help people out, I'd be happy to.
-- thanks,
David Small
Oh, thank you for your note. That takes me back. Control Data Corporation, summer 1980, San Jose, California. My first job out of college was CDC. So was I developing software for
But noOOoo, this was the very new microcomputer division, developing for the
My job was not glamorous. I was doing QA for non-exciting programs (stock-market analysis!) written in Basic, which was a truly slow Basic. I'd start an analysis, go to lunch, come back, and see if it had finished.
You can imagine my thoughts about this computer.
One day I remember seeing a crowd around the new computer a few cubicles down. I walked down. A TV was on and
I can remember going back to my cubicle and dazedly thinking, "There's a whole new world out there... " and, after awhile, thinking
That event changed my career, my life, and I'm forever grateful.
Thanks for writing your post. I, too, get a little misty-eyed thinking about how far we've come just since I got out of college in 1980.
Thank you,
David Small
former columnist,
Creative Computing
Are there still 8GB fast dual-channel SLC USB sticks available?