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."

Comments

Re:FS

[Tubal-Cain]

Yes, there is. But those are designed for raw access to the flash medium. The drive's controller provides a facade of having a whatever you formatted it as.

Re:I thought everyone knew this

[blind biker]

Mod parent up! This is the heart of the problem right there: manufacturers don't write whether the USB drive (or SD card, or any other Flash RAM device) uses SLC or MLC Flash RAM. But that's the main difference. SLC Flash will survive 100.000 write/erase cycles, MLC only about 5000. That's a HUGE difference. Especially if you use the USB drive to host an OS that likes logging a lot. Each log write implies the whole Flash RAM block (usually 128 KB) to be erased and then written to.

Logging is the Flash RAM killer.

And Kingston and Sandisk should start putting "SLC" or "MLC" on their products, so we techies know whether they are worth the double price.

Re:I thought everyone knew this

[TeknoHog]

And Kingston and Sandisk should start putting "SLC" or "MLC" on their products, so we techies know whether they are worth the double price.

I was just discussing this the other day, and my friend found this: http://www.kingston.com/ukroot/flash/flashendurance.asp