Oh, by the way...

[ameerat42]

This is a story about USB sticks of the USB3 category.

I now have three such things, ranging from 8 GB to 64 GB.

Now EVERYbody know that when you plug a USB3 external drive into a USB3 port you get greased lightning performance...
(Yeah! Right! Spt n!...) Typically 100MB/Sec transfer (a few more nods of agreement).

Well, with EVERY 1 of these 3 sticks I get the most meek and mild and humble transfer rates - 5 MB/sec to sometimes a brief 20MB/sec.
Fair Dinkum! I get overall faster transfer using a USB2 stick!!??

Has anyone found this to be the case??? I have noted one thing: the USB3 sticks are all formatted FAT 32.
I (who knows how successfully) changed one to NTFS, but it did nothing to the performance.

And there it is...

Am().

[tduell]

Have you tried any of those sticks on another computer?
If they transfer at decent speeds on another computer then maybe your driver software is suspect.
I really don't know...just thinking of possible cause.

Cheers,
Terry

[ameerat42]

None of my other computers have usb3, TD. However, in all the Win10 upgrade excitement I did forget
to try them again, oo now I will and report in a little while...
Ta...

- - - Updated - - -

...Done: Optimaze drive... Now doing... NTFS full format... (taking a long time...) Got it up to 25MB/Sec... after the Optimize.

- - - Updated - - -

Nope! S(h)ame thing.

- - - Updated - - -

OK MAJOR UPDATE.

I've searched online and have found MANY questions as to WHY USB3 sticks are SLOW.

There are NO decent answers!

AND SO - A GENERAL WARNING

Save yer money and DON'T pay extra for USB3 sticks as you get slower performance than from USB2 sticks.

However, USB3 External HDDs are TOPS!!!

[arthurking83]

....

Has anyone found this to be the case??? I have noted one thing: the USB3 sticks are all formatted FAT 32.
I (who knows how successfully) changed one to NTFS, but it did nothing to the performance.

And there it is...

Am().

Yes!
I think I've posted about this before(on numerous times).
The issue may not be(or may be) the USB stick. It could be your USB3 subsystem .. that is the underlying hardware that makes it USB3.
Drivers can play a big part .. but this is usually with stability.

Inside your USB3 stick, is (on the whole) two major electronic chipsets.
The major one of course is the flash memory module(s).
To get the data to and from the flash module, is another chipset that (basically) translates the flash modules 1's and 0's into data for transfer over the USB system.
It's this chip(the translator type) that has the biggest effect on performance.
if you happen to get unlucky and get the crappiest 'translator' chipset in your device(s) .. then there's really nought you can do about it.

The only way to ensure against a wasted effort such as this is to search for reviews/fora/geeky sites that deal with this stuff.

(once again) I've posted about my ordeal a few times with my USB3 docking station.
Docking station is like an external hdd system where you literally just slot in a bare HDD of any type and it comes up as a regular drive.
They are so cool .. but predominantly used for retrieving data off dead/dying drives. I also use mine for data archiving too tho .. so instead of having your data live all the time, you plonk it in the cock, transfer data, and then remove the drive and store it somewhere safe.
After many months of issue with the docking station not working via USB3 and only via USB2 at very slow rates .. I eventually tracked it down to one of those 'translator' chips in the docking station.
Updated many various firmwares to the dock, and then started with various non standard firmwares .. eventually the hopeless 'translator' chip maker released a new firmware for that dodgy chip and USB3 has been fine ever since.

The issue with USB3 prior to the new firmware was that it would just drop the connection without warning I've only just found a few corrupted raw files due to this problem.
So with the right drives, I can now get a consistent 120MB/s transfer rate over USB3, so it takes 1Tb of data only about 3 hours or so to transfer
Before that, and stuck at USB2 connection I could only manage about 10MB/s and it took nearly a full 24hours to transfer the same 1Tb of data.

I've had experience with 2 USB3 sticks, one which I gave away.
I do remember this one to be fast enough .. but never really got a chance to test it with a lot of data.
But the one I did keep(larger 64G too) was my Patriot XT USB3 stick. This one flys in terms of data transfer rates. Both read and write.

I'll post the Crystal Diskmark results:

Patriot XT 64G USB3 stick:

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 4.1.0 x64 (C) 2007-2015 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s]
* KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes

Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 205.068 MB/s
Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 71.597 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 8.334 MB/s [ 2034.7 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 0.732 MB/s [ 178.7 IOPS]
Sequential Read (T= 1) : 162.539 MB/s
Sequential Write (T= 1) : 63.539 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 6.792 MB/s [ 1658.2 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 0.768 MB/s [ 187.5 IOPS]

Test : 1024 MiB [G: 0.2% (0.1/58.9 GiB)] (x3) [Interval=5 sec]
Date : 2015/07/09 13:45:01
OS : Windows 7 Professional SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64)

My fastest HDD(mechanical) Seagate 3Tb Barracuda:

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 4.1.0 x64 (C) 2007-2015 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s]
* KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes

Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 179.773 MB/s
Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 177.051 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 0.704 MB/s [ 171.9 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 1.365 MB/s [ 333.3 IOPS]
Sequential Read (T= 1) : 179.102 MB/s
Sequential Write (T= 1) : 175.760 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 0.672 MB/s [ 164.1 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 1.389 MB/s [ 339.1 IOPS]

Test : 1024 MiB [X: 50.2% (1403.7/2794.5 GiB)] (x3) [Interval=5 sec]
Date : 2015/07/09 13:17:15
OS : Windows 7 Professional SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64)

[Cage]

Arthur, I started reading your post but my head started hurting about 1/3 of the way down.

[ameerat42]

AK. Gulp! THOSE speeds are something else. If I ever bovver to think about USB3 sticks again I'll do a lot of research (incl. re-reading this post)
first. It's just OdD that it's only with the sticks it happens, and not with the card reader or the 3 x passport type drives. They all fly. The sticks just
STAY IN THE MUD!!

[farmmax]

Arthur, I started reading your post but my head started hurting about 1/3 of the way down.

Do you mean you actually made it 1/3 of the way down

[geoffsta]

I have a 32gb USB. Runs a bit over 100mb/s for a single file (eg; Movie/zip file) Multiple files (photos) slows down to between 80-90mb/s. Sure you don't have a dud computer, or have plugged you USB3 port into the USB2 socket. *Not sure whether you use a laptop or desktop..

[ameerat42]

A very late lapfast. No USB2 ports. I get your speed - 100 - for the external HDDs.