Flash drive write speeds slow as hell all of a sudden

Octopuss · Jul 25, 2018

I have 32GB Sandisk Extreme USB3 flash drive that used to be extremely fast, with write speeds in the 100MB/s range. I've just noticed this dropped to 25MB/s and there's nothing that would fix it. I tried slow formatting and nothing.
What should I do?

jboydgolfer · Jul 25, 2018

Octopuss said:
I have 32GB Sandisk Extreme USB3 flash drive that used to be extremely fast, with write speeds in the 100MB/s range. I've just noticed this dropped to 25MB/s and there's nothing that would fix it. I tried slow formatting and nothing.
What should I do?

I'd recommend using a different usb drive to figure out if the issue is the sandisk itself & not the pc. If the issue isn't replicated amongst other drives, it wouldn't surprise me as I've had several Sandisk drives go junk on me

You could also change how windows handles USB drives by selecting media or video or whatever options are in USB storage handling. Meaning in properties verify that it's set up for video, or text, etc,One may be better than the other

like this

StrayKAT · Jul 25, 2018

Personal anecdote: I noticed this happening to me a few days ago after running a flash drive on a Chrome book for a bit... and [stupidly] pulling it out without dismounting. Then going back to Windows, it was slow as hell. I ended up having to reformat the whole drive and dragged 20 gigs or so back on to it. Works good now, so it wasn't hardware. Have you done anything resembling this? Just throwing this out there. lol

edit: By something similar, I really mean switching between OSes with different file systems. The new OS may be actually in a background progress updating how to read things (ike FAT tables), even though you may be done with any actual file copying.

Caring1 · Jul 26, 2018

Put it in a USB3 slot, you're welcome

Toothless · Jul 26, 2018

Sometimes if it's a load of smaller files it can choke a bit.

Octopuss · Jul 26, 2018

It appears that my stupid Windows kept rercognizing the flash drive as USB2 instead of USB3. Either a restart or reinstallation of the driver seems to have fixed it.

Caring1 · Jul 26, 2018

Just as I thought, it slowed to USB2 speeds.

Octopuss · Jul 26, 2018

Caring1 said:
Just as I thought, it slowed to USB2 speeds.

Not necessarily. Isn't USB2's speed limit something like 60MB/s?

kastriot · Jul 26, 2018

Octopuss said:
Not necessarily. Isn't USB2's speed limit something like 60MB/s?

25-30MB/sec max in practice

Octopuss · Jul 26, 2018

What does that depend on though?

Gasaraki · Jul 26, 2018

Max USB2 speed is low 30MB/s. It depends on the port on your computer, USB3 drivers, and the drive itself.

Octopuss · Jul 26, 2018

Gasaraki said:
Max USB2 speed is low 30MB/s. It depends on the port on your computer, USB3 drivers, and the drive itself.

480/8=?

kastriot · Jul 26, 2018

Octopuss said:
480/8=?

480Mbit-20%(8/10 bit encoding ie 20%!)=384-(flow control+ packet framing)=280Mbit/sec divide by 8=35MB/sec max.

Octopuss · Jul 26, 2018

What encoding? I am not encoding any films, I am copying files!
Anyway, doesn't matter.

StrayKAT · Jul 26, 2018

Glad you figured it out.

People should heed my warning though. I yanked out my drive out of Chrome because that seems to be a thing of the past on Windows. Don't know the difference between the nitty gritty IO operations of each, but I'm pretty sure Google's is far more ghetto. They only make good enough products to destroy competitors (which, funnily, was once Microsoft's role). And probably why they're phasing it out as we speak. It's mission was accomplished.

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Flash drive write speeds slow as hell all of a sudden

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