Sharing the fact that my new Mushkin Ventura Pro 32G USB 3.0 runs portable apps like a hard drive -- in a USB 2.0 port! Not used to seeing Sunbird and Thunderbird come up in a flash.
On newegg it doesn't have any failures, but, warning, the 64G model does.
I reformatted it to NTFS, 512 byte sectors (recommended by Mushkin support for NTFS). NTFS damages less easily than the default FAT 32, and can take big files.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820226227
Forgot to say -- I'm actually running the apps from a True Crypt encrypted file. I back up the file to another stick and so on.
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My experience with NTFS, which is consistent with several others that I have heard of, is that NTFS is less resilient to errors than FAT32, perhaps due to its increased complexity. Certainly it is slower. Support for files larger than 2GB is the only thing that I would consider it to have in its favour.
Have you ever tried it in a USB 3.0 port? If it's capable of going over USB 2.0 speed, you may not realise just what performance you're missing. USB 2.0 can't be as fast as even a fairly old disk. (Here I speak from the perspective of one who's never used a USB 3.0 port or disk.)
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When I had Win 98 in FAT 32, when it crashed (which it liked to do), chkdsk would find damage. I've read that NTFS is more robust through crashes. Something about NTFS being a "journaling" file system. I've never had NTFS develop errors in a crash or lockup.
Would like to mention that the similarly priced SanDisk Extreme USB 3.0 flash drives run apps even faster than mechanical HDD.
16GB: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820171647
32GB: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820171648
64GB: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820171649
And I would highly recommend one of those, as I'm rocking the 16GB version now.
Are you using it on USB 3 or USB 2? Can you comment on how it works on USB 2?
I've been waiting ages for a reasonably priced thumb drive with good small file performance. This is the first I've heard of the Sandisk Extreme and it seems to be the ticket, but there are a disturbing number of remarks on USB 2 compatibility problems. It's hard to know how representative those remarks are.
I've had it for about two weeks now. I got the 16GB version off eBay for around $25 (with shipping). I'm using it with a USB extension cord and I haven't had any problems with USB 2.0 backwards compatibility on Ubuntu Linux 12.10 and Windows 7. It runs like a champ.
My computer doesn't support USB 3.0, so I haven't had a chance to even try it on that. Could you link me to the "remarks"?
Good enough for me. Thanks for the response.
Here are the places where I found compatibility remarks.
http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Extreme-Flash-Drive-SDCZ80-064G-X46/produc...
http://reviews.sandisk.com/5417/161251700/reviews.htm
The number of remarks is small but the proportion that mention compatibility issues is disturbing. Again, hard to tell if it's representative or the oh-so-common bias for reviews to skew negative.
Looking at those, I really feel like most reviewers don't know much about flash drives. USB 2.0 obviously pales in comparison, considering that the drive is already at the max speed available for 2.0. So on 3.0, it's clear that performance is a significant improvement.
I can reproduce the squeaking issue one reviewer mentioned, but it really doesn't bother me. The sound isn't too disturbing, but it might bother some people.
Another reason mentioned was that it felt "light and cheap". I personally thought that the finish that felt "cheap" was an improvement on the feel, and the "lightness" was an advantage. I can feel a clear difference in weight compared to my old Cruzer Micro.
One issue I'm thinking with the Amazon reviews is that the 64GB model probably comes formatted as exFAT by default. I wonder if any of the reviewers (particularly Mac users) giving 1-star reviews bothered reformatting it to FAT32 or similar.
As for the second link, that's a different model (SanDisk Extreme Contour). The SanDisk Extreme USB 3.0 just became available last month.
I connected the 16GB and 32GB models to a Dell Pentium 3 PC running XP Professional and it worked just fine. Haven't run benchmarks on USB 2.0 yet, though. I imagine the SanDisk Extreme will be able to max out USB 2.0 ports. For what it's worth, on any SSD inside a Rosewill SATA to USB 2.0 enclosure connected to a powered USB 2.0 hub, I get around 25-30MB/s sequential and 512K read/write and 5-6MB/s 4K and 4K QD32 read/write with CrystalDiskMark.
Guessing the 5-6MB/s limit on random 4K performance might be due to USB polling rate.
Here's a performance comparison of the flash drives I own when connected to USB 3.0
http://img194.imageshack.us/img194/6250/cdmflashdriveusb3.png
Wheewwe..
Post that on one of the SanDisk forum topics. See if those negative comments about speed keep coming.
Sorry, my mistake. That second link is not the right one. I believe the remarks I remember were in the sandisk forums. Oddly I cannot find the forum visit in my history (?!?) but I think this might be it.
http://forums.sandisk.com/t5/All-SanDisk-USB-Flash-Drives/Sandisk-Extrem...
Anyway, it's comforting to get additional confirmation that the extreme works on USB 2. I have one on order.
Out of curiosity is small file performance on the 32 GB faster than on the 16 GB? I expect either will be limited on USB 2 as you mention, but is it faster on USB 3?
Generally small file write performance (key to portable app performance) is orders of magnitude slower than USB2's max throughput. Only sequential read/write are limited by USB2 (how fast you can copy that movie or MP3). And, generally, larger drives mean slower performance with equal hardware.
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The 5-6MB/s limit I hit on USB2 was with SSDs which when connected to a SATA2 port have random 4k read/write of at least 10+ MB/s. Since I got the same speed (5-6MB/s or around 1,200-1,500 IOPS) on USB2 with all the SSDs I've tried (w/2 different adapters) regardless of whether or not the SSD's random 4k read/write is 15MB/s or 25MB/s, I think the issue is something inherent with USB2.
I tried reading up on USB2 vs USB3 since I was surprised to see such a big difference with random 4K performance using SSDs on USB2 and USB3 when I came across this:
http://www.everythingusb.com/superspeed-usb.html
As for whether the SanDisk Extreme USB 3.0 32GB is faster than the 16GB model, only in sequential write (110MB/s vs 55MB/s). Initial benchmarks of the 32GB does have the 32GB model performing faster than the 16GB with random 4K and 4K QD32 write of 8-10MB/s. Alas, it doesn't quite recover from abuse as quickly as the 16GB model. After several runs of AS SSD and CDM, random 4k performance on the 32GB model dropped down to just ~1.5MB/s (around the same speed as mechanical HDDs) and it's been slow to recover. The 16GB model was able to bounce back to its original performance (6-7MB/s) more quickly.
Here's an excerpt from one of the Amazon reviews for the 64GB model:
By the looks of things, 4K performance does scale with size (at least for this series). I'm just not sure how well the higher capacity models recover from a dirty state.
You live in the future?
Sorry for the off-topic post.
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Previously known as kAlug.
Alpha testing is awesome
I created 6140 files close to 1K each; turned out to be 5.62 MB.
They copy on the Caviar Blue hardened disk drive, at about the middle, at 615K/sec.
They copy on the Mushkin, on USB 2.0, at 55-60K/sec.
Use CrystalDiskMark Portable for reliable measurement of small write performance.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Is there one of the sticks mentioned which does tell a Windows host not to be "removable media"?
Background:
I am looking for a stick which may contain more than one partition to be seen on a Windows system. One of these partitions would contain a bootable LINUX (with WINE, of course), another one the casper-rw if needed, a third one Portable Apps (for Windows), and even a fourth partition might be of interest to separate files for exchange purposes.
LINUX (the distributions I know) doesn't mind about the "removable media bit" in the hardware descriptor of the stick but windows does. Therefore on windows systems only one partition (at most) will be mounted if RMB=1.