128gb stick with very low write speed doesn't make any sense to be honest...

If you are using a memory stick to make a backup copy of something then the speed isn't important. Computers can do more than one thing at a time, you set your copy going and leave it to do its thing while you carry on doing whatever you usually do on your computer. Come back to it a couple of hours later when it is done and put it in a safe place hoping you will never need it again.

Except for, say, archiving, etc.

So it's increased in price by £1 since I bought one last September.

128gb stick with very low write speed doesn't make any sense to be honest...

got one of these, loads of series plugged in android box.

How long do you think it would take to transfer say 100 GB onto this drive?

If you are using a memory stick to make a backup copy of something then the speed isn't important. Computers can do more than one thing at a time, you set your copy going and leave it to do its thing while you carry on doing whatever you usually do on your computer. Come back to it a couple of hours later when it is done and put it in a safe place hoping you will never need it again.

USB 2.0, to slow for 128gb

Well if I was I wouldn't sit there watching it - you would be some sort of plank to suddenly decide "I must go and copy 100gb of files to that USB drive".
Everyone wants the best, biggest, fastest, but also want it cheap.

will take 35 hours at maximum theoretical speed to fill this up. assuming you lose 20% overhead this will be 42 hours.

The problem is that copying 100GB to this stick won't just take a couple of hours, will it? It depends on the type of file, but *very roughly* 100MB per minute is achievable in real life. So, about half a day to a day to copy 100GB. That might work for some purposes, but it's really quite a long time to wait for a job to complete.

I bought a fairly fast USB 3 drive for £1.50 more a couple of months ago, so it's not as if you have to pay a fortune more to get a sizeable speed increase.

I don't understand why people complain about slow speeds on cheap sticks? I have one slow stick like this for archiving then invested the money saved on a Sandisk Extreme. You will not find a memory stick that ticks every box unless money is no concern.

​128000 mb capacity, theoretical 30mb/s transfer speed. 128000/60 is 2133 minutes. 2133/60 is 35 hours.

oops it should be 60mb/s so half the time - 17 hours

either way those are theoretic best case. you might see only half that performance. i woyld realistically not attempt to use anything at usb 2 over 32gb.

That's more like it.:smirk:
I'm with you, I've tested several usb2.0 drives using CrystalDisk and generally get in the range 5 to 8 MB/s.
I was interested in seeing JediBen's calculation, which is still flawed.

128000 MB divide by 8 = 16000 seconds, divide by 60 = 267 minutes, divide by 60 = 4.5 hours, (theoretically).


Haha, great minds.

I bought this USB a while back, I remember it taking 5-6 hours from netbook hard drive to this, approximately 110gb.
speed was not an issue as its just favorite series plugged in an android box.

ah yes i see i jumped straight from mb/s to minutes without making the division required :wink:

I think you should try a real life test, copying a directory onto one of these sticks. The whole process goes far, far slower than you'd expect from calculations based on theoretical top speeds. In real life, I got around 100 MBytes per minute, as I reported above. That's so far within the USB2 performance limit that it's not the USB interface that's holding things up, but the internals within the memory stick.

This was on a Dane Elec drive btw.

Theoretical speed is 60MB/s and my calculations are based on real life 8MB/s. What's your point again? :smile:

That's five times as fast as I actually achieved. Do you have details of the drive you used and the files you copied?

There's something wrong with your USB stick or your computer. 2MB/s is really slow.
Check post #17, please:
Also most of my USB 2.0 sticks are between 5MB/s and 10MB/s. If the speed is lower than 5 I usually return them back. You should consider this option too.

I just tried a more modern usb stick. The DaneElec one is five years old. The more modern one is significantly faster, getting 5+MB/s.

I have a 256mb version of this, its about 10 years old, looks identical

That's more like USB 2.0 :smiley: