16GB pendrives

Merlin5

Merlin5

Merlin5

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I was about to buy a 16GB USB pen drive to transfer large folders from my pc to a laptop I'm getting tomorrow. I'm also receiving a TP-Link 300mbps wireless router from OcUK tomorrow. A mate might have saved me money though? He told me it's faster doing it via wi-fi than usb stick. Is that the case? I thought copying a folder onto the pen from my pc and then downloading from pen to laptop would be quicker. My connection is virgin cable broadband 10mb where I normally max at 1mb/s download speeds. Is that faster than a usb stick?
 
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WiFi has no relation to your Internet connection. It will route internally at the speeds it can manage (Signal strength, interference, quality of kit etc dependant)

I can transfer to my PS3 much faster with USB stick because it's wireless is trash. Between my N enabled Laptop and Wire PC into Wireless N router it's much faster than a pen drive is.
 
I would have thought the USB would be quicker. We're also on Virgin 10mb here and transfering from my wired desktop to another system (wireless N I think) is frustatingly slow.
 
Hmm. Alright then thanks guys. I'll probably end up ordering a pen drive then.
I can try out the wi-fi transfer tomorrow anyway and see how it goes before ordering a usb stick. Mind you, I just remembered I do own a 2GB pen drive, so I could at least do a comparison transferring the same folder both ways.

Sin Chase, I don't understand much about network stuff, so bear with me if you would :p About the " it will route internally at the speeds it can manage". Ok, the laptop will probably have a 150mbps wireless card in it (I think), the router is 300mbps and my connection is 10mb. So if there's good signal strength and no interference, it should presumably download stuff at the same speeds or very close as my wired connection, no?
 
please please make sure you read the specs of the pen drive before ordering

i bought a 16gb sandisk pendrive and the write speed is so slow i could do it manually on floppy disks running back and forth faster!

in all honesty im lucky to get 1MBps transfer speed to the pendrive :mad:
 
Thanks panyan. You're right. First, I'm staying away from unbranded. Second, the cheapest branded I can find is Kingston Generation 3 16GB DataTraveller USB Drive at £10.94.

One review said:

"Bought a couple of these 16Gb G3 Datatravellers and they work just fine. Read and Write speeds seem fast enough - Windows 7 on my old Dell laptop reports 20Mb/sec when reading, and 10Mb/sec when writing to these sticks during simple large file copy operations. fwiw, I also timed another file copy test under XP on my faster E8200 desktop. 53sec to write 4 files totalling 780Mb to the stick, 23sec to read same files off the stick back to hard drive. "

Is that good, or should I be looking at something better? Is that fast enough, or should I be looking at something like corsair?
 
i would say it would average out at about the same. It can be slow copying to the drive but if you do it over the network you can just do a big chunk of it in one go rather than in 16gig pieces.
 
Okey dokey. Thanks OCuK Gurus. :D

Tomorrow, once I've set up my router (assuming DX turn up), and received my new lappy, I'll test how long it takes to transfer a file with my 2GB pen drive, then test how long it takes over the wi-fi. I shall report back. If the USB is quicker by a good margin, I'll order the Kingston 16GB.
 
My 'Dual Channel' OCZ Rally writes at bewteen 10 and 15MB(ytes)/Second.

Wireless throughput is a bit of black magic at times, but assuming you can manage 150MBit/Sec on your wireless that equates to about 18MB(ytes) per second. In reality you will probably pull between 6-7MBytes over 150Mbit/S wireless. Remember it's a simultaneous write so for a pen drive to keep up it's going to need to write and read at an average of 12-14MBytes/Second. Factor in the mount/dismount times between systems and it will not be all that faster.

This is for a contiguous large file, so think movies, ISO images and the like. Lots of smaller sized files will kill throughput and I would give a network transfer the edge here, especially over FTP.
 
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Mb = MegaBit
MB = Megabyte
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As mentioned. Your internet connection speed has no bearing what so ever on your home network transfer speeds.
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OK... I'll try and help make it super simple for you... It really is simples.

As mentioned. It depends on the pendrive how fast it will read and write data to it. I have a Corsair Voyager GT and it's pretty quick compared to most pen drives... it's designed for speed.

I also have a Gigabit lan in my house, which I always use to transfer files between computers. a 1GB file can be transferred in around 30 seconds or less... which is significantly faster than it would take to copy it onto a pen drive, then walk to the other PC, plug it in and start the copy procedure.

As you don't have Gb LAN. You will be bottlenecked at the slowest part of your network... Depending on what that is... that will be your transfer rate. If your laptop is wireless "G" then it will connect at 54Mbps... which equates to 6.75MBps... that's how much data you will be able to transfer over the network per second. You know the file sizes of the files you want to send over. You can do the maths.

If you take into consideration the time it takes to find the pen drive, plug it in... copy the files, safely remove hardware... walk to next PC... plug it in... find files, copy over... it's all a bit of a hassle. I'd bet that even with the slowest possible wireless connection (54Mbps) that it's definitely more convenient and probably quicker than using a pen drive.

If you were transferring 5GB plus of data at a time. I would recommend a small external HDD. These have much quicker read and write speeds than pendrives and don't cost all that much more than a 16GB quick pen drive.

300Mbps = 37.5MB worth of data per second. If your laptop or whatever the other device is can do that... then it's definitely going to be faster than any pen drive.

Just because the router is 300Mbps capable, doesn't mean the other device is. What is the other device? Laptop, PC? What network card does it use?

Hope this helps. If you let me know the answer to the last question I will be able to give you exact times on file transfers and compare them to a pen drive, HDD and network transfer for you.
 
But 18mb would be the max possible speed it can do, generally on Wireless you don't quite get that, but not far off usually. With ethernet you can get speeds of up to 128mb on Gibabit.
 
Phil2008 said:
That kind of makes sense as a wired normal netwok connection is 100mbps and that maxes out at about 10mb/s. But if this is so, why are ppl always banging on about that wireless is much slower then hardwired?
Click to expand...

Because it is. Wireless is not a full-duplex connection (Data is not sent both ways simultaneously) added to the fact signal degradation, interference and a whole host of other problems serves to reduce throughput. Plenty of research looking at Full Duplex wireless communication but you will not see it in consumer grade kit for a while. I think MIMO kit serves to help with this problem but I have no hands-on experience with it personally to comment on it's effectiveness beyond the marketing hype.
 
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