Do you know a good USB-Stick brand/model that has few failures?

Discussion in 'hardware' started by __Nikopol, Dec 3, 2018.

  1. zapjb

    zapjb Registered Member

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    USA still the best. But barely.
    I wish. It'll take the 2nd or 1st coming of the messiah. Nothing short of that will work.
     
  2. Firecat

    Firecat Registered Member

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    In a bid to save costs, manufacturers just slap a USB 3.X port on a memory controller that was only designed to use USB 2.0. In other cases, they buy lower grade chips that are not meeting USB 3.0 performance standards but yet are able to identify themselves as USB 3.X compliant. Sometimes they just buy cheaper, slower NAND memory....

    In the memory market the margins are super slim, so they try and cut corners wherever possible.
     
  3. Circuit

    Circuit Registered Member

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    Land o fruits and nuts, and more crime.
    :argh::argh::argh:. Has nothing to do with throw-away crap made in other countries.:p
     
  4. __Nikopol

    __Nikopol Registered Member

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    Everyone is doing that, huh? :(
    What do you mean? It's global. And it will be hard to get things from china here in europe, for example.
     
  5. Firecat

    Firecat Registered Member

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    It's nowadays standard industry practice to performance grade silicon chips and price them according to the performance each chip delivers so that wastage is minimised.

    The real deal, high quality, fast memory is usually sold in a separate lineup usually marked as extreme, high endurance, performance etc. by some flash drive manufacturers. They also cost a lot more....
     
  6. pandlouk

    pandlouk Registered Member

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  7. __Nikopol

    __Nikopol Registered Member

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    The transcent page is kaputt, atm: SSL_ERROR_UNSUPPORTED_VERSION
    I've had micro SD cards die on me, but never a usb stick. I actually have a 64 GB card that can't be written to, but reading is no problem. So I'm a little biased with cards.
     
  8. pandlouk

    pandlouk Registered Member

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    The page reloads fine at my end.
    I had usb flash drives fail (1 kingston, 1 lexar and 1 pny) with no possibility of recovery, so I prefer sd cards.
    The best performing and relatively cheap usb3.x flash drives that I have seen are lexar jumbdrive s25 and s75. I have 6 of them (32gb and 64gb) and all perform the same ~150mb/s read and ~60mb/s write.
     
  9. __Nikopol

    __Nikopol Registered Member

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    How do SD card sticks compare to normal stick for you?
     
  10. pandlouk

    pandlouk Registered Member

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    It depends from the sd card.
    edit: performed some tests on my nuc5ppyh... its usb3 controller is not that great but will do for consistancy for the tests... on other machines with better controllers you should expect a 20-25% better/faster performance.

    kingston sd 16gb.JPG samsung evo plus 64gb.JPG lexar s25 64gb.JPG
    https://www.amazon.com/Kingston-16GB-microSDHC-microSD-SDCS/dp/B079H6PDCK
    https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-MicroSDXC-Memory-Adapter-MB-MC64GA/dp/B06XFWPXYD
    https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00S5V62RQ/

    for the sd cards I used the transcend RDF5 USB3 card reader
     
    Last edited: Dec 7, 2018
  11. __Nikopol

    __Nikopol Registered Member

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    Hm. Looks good. Kingston again the worst in speed, SD or Stick doesn't seem to matter.
    Thank you I keep that in mind when I need more storage.

    Did you boot from the adapter? Does it work and is it as BIOS compatible as a USB stick?
     
  12. Circuit

    Circuit Registered Member

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    I know you won't listen , but Sony 4 GB been using for 10 years.
    Shameful to say this on Pearl Harbor Day.
     
  13. pandlouk

    pandlouk Registered Member

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    Yes, it boots on every system that I have tested it (macs 2008 and later, eepc from 2007, even on an ancient hp with a pentium 4 northwood and an amd athlon xp barton).
     
  14. __Nikopol

    __Nikopol Registered Member

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    I do listen, but it's not important. :) That's 10 years ago: Literally everything in the supply chain and production changed already, and you can't buy these anymore.
    Thanky you, that's good to know. :)
     
  15. __Nikopol

    __Nikopol Registered Member

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    I bought two of the Transcend JetDrive 790K 32 GB for 6.99€ each. https://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B00JKATVUQ/
    I received the sticks yesterday and made one into a universal boot stick. It was a good decision to buy a relatively big one.
    Universal-boot-stick menu.png

    I tested the speed of the sticks and compared both the new one and the universal boot stick.
    The universal boot stick is 69% full and has a 4 KB block-size NTFS file system. (It's NTFS because Microsoft made their new ISO too big)
    If you look at HD-Tune you can see which sector I already wrote to once. (The fast ones)
    CrystalDiskMark gives a pretty good representation on the actual speed when I write or read a big file on it.
    ATTO Disk Benchmark shows how fast different block sizes are on the actual file system.
    Transcent32GB-test-69%.png

    This here is the empty, new one. (I only ever wrote a 1 GB file on it.) Again HD-Tune show exactly which sector has been used once. That's why the graph looks so horrible and the speed is so slow.
    Transcent32GB-test-new.png

    This is the same stick after I formatted it slowly (not quick-format) with FAT32 and 32 KB block size. You see that I used every sector once and the write-speed has drastically increased:
    Transcent32GB-test-after-slow-format-fat32-32KB.png

    I'm happy with the speed. It's not as bad as I thought during my first tests. :)

    Does anyone know why new sectors are so slow?
     
    Last edited: Dec 9, 2018
  16. Brian K

    Brian K Imaging Specialist

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    I have a 32 GB Sandisk dual. Standard USB plug one end and Micro USB at the other end.

    ATTO showed Write 97 MB/sec, Read 135 MB/sec.
     
  17. __Nikopol

    __Nikopol Registered Member

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    How much was it?
     
  18. Brian K

    Brian K Imaging Specialist

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  19. __Nikopol

    __Nikopol Registered Member

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    Ah, it's double the price as the Transcent here in germany: EUR 14,15. Couldn't have bought two of that.
    The read speeds of the transcent are OK, so booting is fast enough for me in comparison to a DVD.

    Let's put yours on the list of sticks people should buy. :)
     
  20. Brian K

    Brian K Imaging Specialist

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    $16 Au = 10 EUR
     
  21. __Nikopol

    __Nikopol Registered Member

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    I forgot to paste the link for the sticks on germanys eBay. I'm not paying for postage from australia.
     
  22. Brian K

    Brian K Imaging Specialist

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    Sure. What is the price in Germany?
     
  23. __Nikopol

    __Nikopol Registered Member

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    :D
     
  24. __Nikopol

    __Nikopol Registered Member

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    While all of this appears to be still correct and weird, I made a mistake in HD Tunes configuration and I mistook the results. First mistake was setting it to 4 KB block size and second mistake was thinking it measures write speed. In fact it measure read speeds. That makes much more sense.
    Here's what it looks like when it's set to 32 KB, which is a good value. The program actually shows almost the same values as ATTO Disk Benchmark, but it looks at speeds over the whole disk instead of speeds in a confined space. (512 MB in ATTO, for example).
    Transcent32GB-test-ouch.png

    EDIT: I was fumbling around with it. I did a low level format and then quick formatted it, but I can't reproduce the factory condition. Does anyone know why factory-new sectors/blocks are so slow/different from after having been written to once?
     
    Last edited: Dec 10, 2018
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