Thumb Drive VS External SSD

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noluck4

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Nov 12, 2013
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I am trying to decide between buying an external 500GB Samsung T1 Portable USB 3.0 or another thumb drive. Capacity is not what I care about right now. It's speed. I want to be able to move some files around a bit faster than using my thumb drives. We are talking system images, and Music backups.

Are external SSD's any faster in the real world, than their thumb drive relatives?
 
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atheus
I'm not being a dick. You wrote "in some ways the SSD would be better, but more expensive." which is ambiguous. In regards to speed, which is what the OP is asking about, it's massively better in all ways. For sustained transfers, it's at least 3x faster, but more likely about 5-6x faster. For small reads/writes, an SSD is faster by one or two orders of magnitude. You are probably aware of this too, but what you wrote made it sound like the give and take makes it a close call.

Aside from that, there is no such thing as a thumb drive that is bottlenecked by USB 3.0's maximum transfer rate, so that's just misleading. Thumb drives don't get anywhere near the max speed of USB 3.0, while external SSD's do.
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atheus

atheus

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Err... actually the portable SSD is massively faster than a thumb drive. Don't let that ambiguous answer fool you. Just look up the transfer rates for yourself, though. The truth is out there!
 
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atheus

atheus

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Aug 2, 2010
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I'm not being a dick. You wrote "in some ways the SSD would be better, but more expensive." which is ambiguous. In regards to speed, which is what the OP is asking about, it's massively better in all ways. For sustained transfers, it's at least 3x faster, but more likely about 5-6x faster. For small reads/writes, an SSD is faster by one or two orders of magnitude. You are probably aware of this too, but what you wrote made it sound like the give and take makes it a close call.

Aside from that, there is no such thing as a thumb drive that is bottlenecked by USB 3.0's maximum transfer rate, so that's just misleading. Thumb drives don't get anywhere near the max speed of USB 3.0, while external SSD's do.
 
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