Is my USB fast enough?

What size is the drive? And those speeds look a little low compared to most. Also, if you plan on buying from e-bay or other similar location, be sure to research the product, there are many fakes out there that have been hacked to display a larger size than they really are.

I guess you don't mean MB (MegaByte) but Mb (MegaBit).

I guess the difference is a few seconds (not a few minutes).

It doesn't matter THAT much although with very big apps it can be noticeable.

I've just upgraded from a cheap "own brand" 8Gb drive that ran at speed of
read (up to) 8,800 kB/s
write (up to) 2,800 kB/s

which is significantly slower than the drive you're looking at. It was "fast enough". PortableApps all ran from it, even OpenOffice.org, Firefox Portable, GIMP, and such like.

I also used it for shunting large blocks of data from PC to PC (several GB) and it worked.

My new drive is a Sandisk Cruzer Micro 8GB (the U3 autorun is fun, and I've hacked the iso so it starts TrueCrypt and my PA menu), but the drive runs at close to three times the speed of my old one, and the difference is amazing - it still wow's me how much quicker it feels at around 22,000 kB/s read speeds.

Ope thing though.... are those figures quoted ones, or have you tested it? Most drives are actually slower in normal use than in manufacturer 'optimised' benchmarks, and.... pretty much every drive I've ever used / tested (which is a lot, I work in IT support, and currently have 14 drives on my desk from 3 different manufacturers) has had a write speed between half and a third of the write speed - the figures you're quoting look way too close together to me for a low-cost drive. The only times I've seen symmetric performance has been on very high speed, very high price kit.