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entropy
27 Jun 2004, 7:50am
Ok, first of all I absolutely hate ordering from Tiger because of the incredible shipping charges. But, I was wondering, because this is such a good deal. This (http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=623805&Sku=S450-6128%202&CatId=379) flash drive says usb 2.0 ... and I read recently that a lot of drives selling as USB 2.0 are being sneaky and saying they WORK with 2.0, but everyone except the foolish buyer (the targets obviously) knows that usb 2.0 is backwards compatible no matter what. So my question is this - is that drive there a TRUE usb 2.0 drive, or merely one trying to trick me into thinking it is?
Kwitko
27 Jun 2004, 2:01pm
It has the USB High Speed logo, so I'm guessing it is the true 480Mbps USB 2.0. You can read about the 2.0 naming standard at USB.org (http://www.usb.org/info/usb_nomenclature).
entropy
27 Jun 2004, 5:14pm
But isn't 5.5 MB/sec kinda slow for usb 2.0? And that's only read - write is at 1 MB/sec...I coulda sworn 2.0 was much, much faster. Unless that's just the capability of the drive...?
primesuspect
27 Jun 2004, 5:17pm
USB 2.0's theoretical bandwidth is around 480mb/sec

But that says nothing of the media. That's just the transport mechanism (the speed over the wire)... The media itself? 5.5mb sounds about right for flashmedia. Flash is slow, there's nothing that increased bus speed can do about it.
entropy
27 Jun 2004, 5:21pm
Alright, thanks guys. I just assumed since it was 2.0 the drive itself could function parallel with those speeds, but I guess not.
muddocktor
27 Jun 2004, 5:49pm
To give you an idea of what a jump drive can transfer at, I just ran ATTO on my Lexar JumpDrive Elite, which is a fairly inexpensive USB 2.0 jump drive that doesn't have boot capabilities. I also ran ATTO on my relief's JumpDrive Secure, which is a USB 1.1 jump drive and it has considerably lower performance. Here's some shots of both of their ATTO scores:
entropy
27 Jun 2004, 5:57pm
See now that's what I was wondering. If you get almost 6 MB/sec for write, and almost 9 for read, that's way more than that other drive. It got 1 for write, and 5.5 for read.