FASTEST USB drive, for SSD replacement?

Hi,

I'm mainly looking for an SSD/HD replacement, on a USB stick.
At the moment it allows me to boot the same OS from multiple PC's.
I'm currently using a slower older 4GB USB flash drive, with 8/5MB/s R/W.
I'm running Xubuntu, but I need something bigger, and faster!

I read there are almost no SLC USB sticks for sale anymore.

1- So I wanted to know which MLC USB Flash memory stick of between 8GB to 64GB is a good purchase, and is really fast in IOPS.

2- Are 32/64/128GB sticks faster than 8/16GB sticks?

3- I read manufacturers tech specs of USB drives, and read the USB burst rates of read and write, but the majority of the time I'm running an OS it'll load and save small files. More like 4K random read/writes.
Which USB drive is known to have fast 4k random read/writes (or high IOPS)?

I could not find a lot of data or specs or graphs about 4k random read/write tests; much less the differences between USB drives.
Fastest burst R/W does not always mean that it has high IOPS or is a good drive for running an Os on.

I wish toms could do some tests on the performance drives between 8 and 128GB of the main and leading brands of flash memory (Corsair, OCZ, Kingston, supertalent,....)

A graph displaying perhaps 4, 8, 16,32, 64, and 128K Read and writes.

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IMO you can buy an external HDD, more space.

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"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.". Albert Einstein.
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Reply to saint19

Like said, I want an external USB drive, no HD that requires an adaptor, uses as much or more power, and is as still slow!

It is also large and chunky, and not easy to carry around!

Reply to ProDigit80

Heard of notebook HDDs?

They use little power too, and don't need a separate power cable; just the USB cable.

SSDs are used for system disks; not for transferring large files. SSDs should not use USB as interface; it would negate much of the true benefits of SSDs. SSDs are not fast because they have lots of MB/s but because they have lots of IOps.

USB 2.0 is limited to 480Mbps or ~25MB/s in reality; so the USB interface is bottleneck when transferring large files. Any notebook HDD should be fast enough to not be a bottleneck. So go buy a notebook HDD with USB casing and save the SSD as system disk inside your PC/laptop.

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Reply to sub mesa

sub mesa wrote :

Heard of notebook HDDs?

They use little power too, and don't need a separate power cable; just the USB cable.

SSDs are used for system disks; not for transferring large files. SSDs should not use USB as interface; it would negate much of the true benefits of SSDs. SSDs are not fast because they have lots of MB/s but because they have lots of IOps.

USB 2.0 is limited to 480Mbps or ~25MB/s in reality; so the USB interface is bottleneck when transferring large files. Any notebook HDD should be fast enough to not be a bottleneck. So go buy a notebook HDD with USB casing and save the SSD as system disk inside your PC/laptop.

LIKE I SAID: I DON'T NEED A HD! Makes me wonder if people read the topic or not...

I'm well aware of the existence of SSD's that's why I wrote "FASTEST USB DRIVE FOR SSD REPLACEMENT?" in the title!

Second, USB 2.0 flash drives are limited to ~57MB/s transfer speeds, not 25MB/s...

I again want to ask the question, which is the best USB (2.0) flash drive, to replace a SSD drive?

I'm NOT interested in harddrives or SSD drives, or any other replacement disks. ONLY in USB Flash drives!

Thank you!

Message edited by ProDigit80 on 11-05-2009 at 05:11:38 PM

Reply to ProDigit80

You are wrong. 480Mbps is bandwidth, not throughput. In reality you can count on 25MB/s throughput. You are forgetting USB is a heavy protocol with alot of overhead.

The simple USB keys you are looking for do not have an advanced controller that will allow high IOps. Performance on flash is dictated by the controller, not the flash memory itself.

Message quoted 1 times

------------------------------ ...man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but usually manages to pick himself up, walk over or around it, and carry on.
Reply to sub mesa

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6820183247

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6820233095

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6820220261

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6820220437

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6820233072

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6820220438

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6820233094

Select one....

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"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.". Albert Einstein.
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Reply to saint19

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/supe [...] 32191.html

this could perhaps peak your interest

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Reply to paperfox

^But isn't available yet.

------------------------------ If you like my answer, select me as the best answer.
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"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.". Albert Einstein.
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Reply to saint19

sub mesa wrote :

You are wrong. 480Mbps is bandwidth, not throughput. In reality you can count on 25MB/s throughput. You are forgetting USB is a heavy protocol with alot of overhead.

The simple USB keys you are looking for do not have an advanced controller that will allow high IOps. Performance on flash is dictated by the controller, not the flash memory itself.

There have been many claims of drives going faster than that! the fastest so far was 37MB/s.
Check out this page for a benchmark of an external HD over USB2.0 protocol:
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/s [...] i=3035&p=4

The drive has an average of 35MB/s, and I'm sure there are some drives out there that can go faster than that, and literally are able to drown the USB interface in speed!

Even this external HD claims 36MB/s over USB2 : http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=11085

I was thinking in the likes of buying a Corsair 16GB Voyager GT.

I know many users above have posted many USB drives. I can visit newegg too, and read the specs, but very few info is available on 4k random writes.
I had hoped to find someone on the forum that could provide some info on it!

I'll be checking out the links now, and see if there's anything that catches my eye!

Message edited by ProDigit80 on 11-06-2009 at 06:02:18 AM

Reply to ProDigit80

paperfox wrote :

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/supe [...] 32191.html

this could perhaps peak your interest

I've seen the article posted 1 or 2 days after I posted my question; and am aware of the USB 3 interface of the stick. The one depicted in the photo is most likely a 128GB flash drive seeing it's size, and is indeed not out yet.
Not much is known how compatible it will be with with the USB 2 interface, and if we can expect fast data rates, faster or slower than current available USB2 models over a USB2 interface.

Besides the price of 128GB is a bit out of my range of affordable solutions. I'd search for an 8, 16 or 32Gb stick, with top performance, but costing less than $100.

So far, most mentioned USB stick (even in other articles I was digging up from the net) is the Voyager GT series (16GB).

If anyone has any experiences with other drives, that would be greatly appreciated!
If anyone finds pages online with benchmarks between the different sizes of Voyager GT (8, 16, 32GB) would be awesome!
Also, if the Voyager GT has any competitors, like CORSAIR's sticks, or Supertalent, it'd be great to have some benches on those too!

Reply to ProDigit80

look at this:
http://www.ritekusa.com/product_ma [...] d=Consumer

OCZ Throttle also seems to reach upto 36MB/s according to this page:
http://www. x cp us .com/reviews/99-OCZ-Throttle-Review-16GB-eSATA-Flash-Drive-Page-2.aspx (minus the spaces)

It seems 36MB/s (38 peak) is the max for current hardware...

Message edited by ProDigit80 on 11-06-2009 at 04:21:04 AM

Reply to ProDigit80

Surely faster than 25MB/s, but no benches about IOps, which is what you asked about in your OP. The random reads might be okay, but i have my doubts about random writes. The specs say "up to 10MB/s" for random writes; but that could be with blocksizes as high as 1MB. 4KiB or 512 bytes random write are real tests.

Still, this may indeed be one of the fastest flash sticks. But as you can see eSATA gives alot better performance than USB. However, i'm a bit wary of warnings like these:

Quote :

Product Development Update: This device is designed for notebooks using combination eSATA and USB drive ports. The power for the drive is drawn from the USB port in combination eSATA USB ports. Since most desktops commonly do not have this combination port, there is no power to run the eSATA connection; using it with a desktop will damage the drive. We are currently developing a solution for desktop use. Please check back for further product development updates.

------------------------------ ...man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but usually manages to pick himself up, walk over or around it, and carry on.
Reply to sub mesa

It seems that under Windows Vista there is a large performance penalty over USB2.0
I read that under Vista you can get upto 27MB/s over USB2,while Mac,XP,and Linux will give you higher numbers.

I don't know the performance of Windows 7.

It seems that fastest USB sticks at the moment are the sticks with esata and usb support (esata being the fastest).
But esata will be replaced soon by USB3 (is what people believe), and USB 3 might be more compatible and cheaper than a USB disk with an eSata controller onboard.

At the moment the USB+eSata is generally the best out there, but if you can wait,it might be better to wait for USB3 sticks.

Reply to ProDigit80

You may be able get a little beyond 30MB/sec over USB V2.0 if you have a very streamlined sequential transfer - but for the random I/Os typical of booting an OS you won't get anywhere near that much. Each small transfer has a lot of extra latency because of the USB protocol, so you're going to be looking at performance that really isn't that much better than a hard drive - certainly nowhere near the kind of performance you'd be able to get with eSATA, for example.

I don't believe that USB V3.0 will completely replace eSATA. Again, USB V3.0 will be great for sequential transfers, but I'm not at all convinced that it's going to be competitive with eSATA in terms of latencies.

Reply to sminlal

eSATA will not be 'replaced' as you say; eSATA is a direct-connect protocol, while USB is a multi-purpose star-topology protocol with lots of overhead. The result is lower IOps due to higher latencies for each I/O operation. MB/s may be high, but when looking at latencies USB will always be slower than SATA/eSATA. And the CPU overhead will be significantly lower.

I would always prefer (e)SATA over USB. Besides USB 3.0 has 4,8Gbps bandwidth, resulting in some ~300MB/s usable throughput. Bandwidth and throughput are not the same things. If you look at cars on road, not all road capacity can be used by cars; they need to be at a certain distance or bad things will happen; this is the so called overhead. So the usable capacity ('throughput') of the road is lower than the theoretical maximum 'bandwidth'.

However USB will be much more common and universal, eSATA can only connect one type of devices: mass storage. USB 3.0 is also backwards compatible to older versions, although the connector is slightly different and different physical pins are used for USB 3.0, but they still fit and work on older USB 1.1/2.0 motherboards/devices.

------------------------------ ...man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but usually manages to pick himself up, walk over or around it, and carry on.
Reply to sub mesa

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