 Notice. New forum software under development. It's going to miss a few functions and look a bit ugly for a while, but I'm working on it full time now as the old forum was too unstable. Couple days, all good. If you notice any issues, please contact me. |
Forum Index : Microcontroller and PC projects : Cheap, small USB flash drives....
| Author | Message | ||||
Grogster Admin Group  Joined: 31/12/2012 Location: New ZealandPosts: 9610 |
Hi all.  While buying some other bits and pieces on AliExpress one day in the past, I ordered a couple of cheap USB flash drives. Now, we all know that can be a minefield of unknown brands, cheap prices and fake capacity claims and so most people tend to stay away from those, and buy their flash-drives locally. All fair enough. However, I bought a couple of these cheap 4GB ones, that I just wanted to use to boot Puppy Linux boxes running SAMBA NAS file servers. I could no doubt buy 16GB or so drives of that physical size locally for about $15 or so, but I thought: "What the hell!"  I don't need more then 4GB to boot Puppy(actually considerably LESS then that), so in some ways it seemed a waste to use a 16GB flash drive, for a 2GB or so partition with Puppy on it.  They arrived in due course, and I tried one out, not really expecting much. I was pleasantly surprised! Not only did they have the capacity as advertised, but their read/write performance was not really too bad:  Now, the random-read and random-write speeds are in the toilet, but what interested me most was the sequential read/write speeds, and it is interesting to note that these things can WRITE faster then they can read! Normally, read is faster then write. Even on brand-name drives. I have several Toshiba 32GB flash drives here, and they average 5.5MB write speed. Anyway, with 20MB/s write rate, this is perfect for something like Puppy, which simply boots from the USB drive, then loads an image into RAM and runs that the rest of the time. Random read/write is a non-issue with Puppy, due to the sequential read of the 'pupsave' file at boot-up, and also when/if you save the current session back to a pupsave file, that is also a sequential write, so these are perfect. ....and they only cost two bucks each for the 4GB ones, which is all I needed.  Here is a link to these USB flash drives.... I can't speak for the other capacities, but the 4's were certainly a good deal. I will probably buy a couple of the 8's and 16's to test based on the results with the 4's. For comparison, here is the speed test for the 32GB Toshiba flash drive:  As you can see, the Toshiba drive wins on the read speed(as you would expect), but still only averages 9MB write speed, whereas the $2 one from AliExpress can write more then twice the Toshiba's speed - actually rather impressive for a $2 flash drive off AliExpress.  Toshiba is also better at random-read(again - as you would expect with a brand-name drive), but it is actually about the same for random write as the two buck one! But then, I don't think ANY USB flash drive does very well with the random-write tests. Correct me if I am wrong on that.EDIT: Added some extra details. Added test image for the Toshiba flash drive. Edited 2020-07-17 16:19 by Grogster Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops! |
||||
| JohnS Guru  Joined: 18/11/2011 Location: United KingdomPosts: 4044 |
Did you run pattern checks to see what the actual working capacities are? I've bought cheapies which turned out to be only 10MB or the like! John |
||||
Womble Senior Member  Joined: 09/07/2020 Location: United KingdomPosts: 267 |
I use this to test any new USB Drives, it also works to test SD-Cards. A quick Google search should locate a copy. Its freely available. |
||||
| Grogster Admin Group Joined: 31/12/2012 Location: New ZealandPosts: 9610 |
@ JohnS: I just filled it up with close to 4GB of data, and it did not complain, which is what they usually do if they are really a lesser capacity then what is advertised. @ Womble: Thanks, I will look for that. EDIT: Found it. Edited 2020-07-18 16:25 by Grogster Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops! |
||||
 Print this page |
 |
The Back Shed's forum code is written, and hosted, in Australia. | © JAQ Software 2025 |
