USB 3.0 Flash Drive slower than USB 2.0

I have just bought a USB Stick (Flash Drive) from Philips. 32GB USB 3.0. I had some other problems with my USB 3.0 Installation but now this is resovled. My USB 3.0 hub is now a 7 Port USB 3.0 Metall HUB (EX-1188HMS) fron exsys. That hub is now really working. But my Philips stick is slow:

Copy large file to (Win8 OS Copy Speed):

USB2: Patriot Rage XT 16GB / NTFS / 50% full: 20MB/s
USB3: Philips USB 3.0 32GB / ProductID: FM32FD75B/10 / NTFS / empty: 9MB/s

Of course, the stick is not a high price superspeed device like my Patriot USB2.0, but why it is slower than USB2? At least it should be in some low speed USB3.0 speed rates.

And i have made some test with USB3.0 disks. The hub and connectivity are ok an the USB3.0 disk running at the 2x speed on USB3.0 compared to USB2.0.

smallbrain

Posted 2013-10-15T11:40:25.467

Reputation: 31

Are you 100% you have USB 3.0 ports? You need to link to product information for both, a quick search, resulted in 0 accurate serarch results for either product. – Ramhound – 2013-10-15T11:47:11.017

1Just because it supports USB 3.0 doesn't mean it makes use of the potential speed. – Der Hochstapler – 2013-10-15T11:57:00.340

Yes, i'm 100% sure it will be a USB3.0 device on a USB3.0 port. I have checked this with USBdeview from nirsoft. – smallbrain – 2013-10-15T13:15:52.990

Answers

The USB connection isn't the only possible bottleneck in this case. Cheap flash memory cells and their controllers usually provide low or very low data rates.

The Philips FM32FD75B/10 costs 20~25 € and specifies neither read nor write throughput. If they were beyond mediocre, Philips would most likely advertise them.

Also, writing to flash memory drives becomes slower, if they get filled close to their maximum capacity because of wear levelling.

David Foerster

Posted 2013-10-15T11:40:25.467

Reputation: 829

Can you explain why you thing a pen drive gets slower when it gets fuller? (This is usually true for SSDs. These manage where information is stored and have less choices when the drive gets full. But a simple pen drive does not have such a scheme and I see no reason why a simple pen drive should slow down). – Hennes – 2014-11-28T08:42:19.173

@Hennes: I assume you're talking about wear levelling. AFAIK it's common even in low-end flash drives nowadays, since it requires few additional resources but allows for cheaper flash cells to be used. – David Foerster – 2014-11-28T13:50:42.447

Ah. In that case my old knowledge is, well, old and outdated. – Hennes – 2014-11-28T22:45:27.417

The author just purchased the drive. – Ramhound – 2013-10-15T11:49:15.740

He didn't say anything about “just” or recently or what he did with it in the mean time. – David Foerster – 2013-10-15T11:58:42.750

Just purchased and empty. I have added some more Details to my question. – smallbrain – 2013-10-15T13:16:41.933

Your speed depends on a few things:

Chipset used
Driver
Speed of the connection (e.g. USB2 or USB3)
The pen drive you are writing to.

Assuming you test with the same pen drive and the same conditions, then the speed should be the same on both USB 2 and on USB 3.

If you use different pen drives then all bets are off. You could end up with something like this:

Drive capable of 20MB/sec, connnected via USB2
Drive capable of 5MB/sec, connected via USB2
Drive capable of 5MB/sec, connected via USB3

If you compare 1) with 3) then you get logical, if potentially unexpected results.

If the Philips drive is faster on USB2 than on USB3 then you might have a poor USB3 driver, or bad hardware (chipset, cables, USB3 hub, ...)

Hennes

Posted 2013-10-15T11:40:25.467

Reputation: 60 739

-1

With Philips drives it is definitely low quality flash chips because I have a PCIE HDD stored in a USB 3.0 OWC enclosure and the write speed to that drive on both Windows and OS X is 100MB/s - whereas the Philips drive starts around 5Mb/s dropping to 2Mb/s after a few seconds.

This tells me there is no problem with the USB 3.0 ports or the generic windows / os x drivers on my system, but with the drive itself.

Graham Banzer

Posted 2013-10-15T11:40:25.467

Reputation: 1