1
I've recently acquired a new USB Flash drive. It's a Kingston DataTraveler 50 which supports USB 3.2 Gen 1, has 110 MB/s reading and 15 MB/s writing speed. It works great with my old USB2-only laptop running Linux, it works ridiculously fast with a USB3-attached MacBook Air. But it's slow as hell with Windows 10 (freshly installed on a PC with USB3). I didn't even have to measure the speeds, the difference is in orders of magnitude! Reformatting it to NTFS seemingly made it usable (but it doesn't feel an awesome solution as now I can't write it on the Mac) but FAT32 limits its speed far below even USB 2.0 throughput - the same flash drive (as still formatted with FAT32) works uncomparably faster on a Linux machine with USB 2.0. Why is Windows so bad at FAT32?
Enabling write cache for the USB device seemingly improved the speed slightly (so slightly that I'm not even sure it did anything, I can attribute this to placebo effect as I haven't made any measurements) and so did updating the mainboard firmware.
The question is theoretical - I'm actually curious why is this. Nevertheless I would obviously be grateful might anybody suggest a solution to this problem.
Ivan
Posted 2019-08-30T19:53:10.550
Reputation: 6 173
1Odd. What kind of files are you transferring? Lots of small files will be slow... Are you certain the port you connect to is USB3? It may be that you have specific USB3 ports while others are USB2. How much memory does the Win10 machine have? What kind of hard drive is in the Win10 machine? 5400 RPM 2.5 inch laptop drives that are common in laptops are the utter worst and I wouldn't even inflict them on my worst enemy. The Macbook may well have an SSD and Linux over USB2 would not struggle too badly. – Mokubai – 2019-08-30T19:58:28.420
1@Mokubai Copying big files works tolerable but still much slower than via USB 2.0 and Linux. Copying many small files makes me feel it's a floppy drive. Running portable Chrome results in frequent freezes so I have to wait up to 20 seconds for it to unfreeze. Running portable Chrome from an NTFS patition I've added to the same drive feels ok (no freezes). I'm quite sure it's a USB 3.0 port - I've tried all the blue ones on the backside of the PC. Even if it was USB 2.0 - it still works much faster on an older USB2-only laptop running Linux. – Ivan – 2019-08-30T20:45:27.387
1Is it just that flash drive, or any USB device? Do you have another flash drive (different brand would be good), or an external hard drive? As a first step, I would try to narrow the problem to whether it's generic or specific to that device. – fixer1234 – 2019-08-30T23:07:11.263