Pen drive speeds

I have good memories with the Corsair Flash Voyager pendrive,but never make any speed test with this

Now for me any simple pendrive is not go to far from 6MB for writing and maybe 8MB for read

you can try with
Code: 
iostat -w1

or

iostat -w1 [device]

When copy/read files
 
balanga it depends on what you're using it for.
If you use it only occasionally, just get one that has a good USB connection and lists its sustained write speeds. Other than that, they perform best when kept cool and erased first.
If you want more than that out of it, as cracauer@ said, you probably should not be using a pen drive for the task.
 
I'm getting max advertised speeds on my USB drives, both USB2 and USB 3. To see those max speeds using dd I add bs=1M to the dd. And my USB3 pen drives are Kingston.
 
balanga said:
What sort of through put can be expected and is there any way to measure how fast they are?
Click to expand...
What can be expected varies extremely I dare say, from <1 up to >500 MB/s any kind of drives are sold. While the ones without any rates named in their specs are mostly in the lower rates below 15 MB/s.
Yes, of course it can be measured.
And you are right to measure, because by most of the measurements I did myself them specs I saw were revealed as fantastic values sucked from the thumb.

Besides there for sure are some tools for that, there are two simple ways:
1. Use dd if... of... status=progress
2 Or, more realistic: Create a dir the size of the drive, copy its contents to the according drive, and measure the time it takes. Use at least three kinds of file sizes: small, medium and large.
E.g. with a small script (basically a 3 liner): get date, copy the garbage to the drive, get date; you may do the calculations afterwards by hand, or add some lines for it in the script.

Apart from the drive's speed particulary with USB you also need to respect the port's speed. Not every USB port offers the full speed specified by the standards.

I have a Corsair GLX flash drive - very fast in read and write, maybe the fastest there is, BUT I simply don't need it. You need to see a few things about pen, or flash drives to put any ideas about its usage into perspective first:
  • They are slower than any real storage drive.
  • As always data transfer speed needs to be distinguished into read and write. Particulary USB flash drives have very different values in this case: write is (almost) always significantly way slower than reading. In combination with the next point this limits their practical usages, particulary when thinking of running a systems from it (among others writing to /var/ may slow down the system too much, to be practically useful.)
  • They are not reliable for as many read and write cycles than HDD/SSDs.
  • Especially the fast ones can get pretty warm. I don't tested it, but I doubt they stand permanent operations.
To me flash drives are neither for storage of important data, nor for permanent usage, but for quick'n'dirty data transport or short time used live systems only: give a buddy some pix, or presentation which were too large for an email attachment, or as an installation medium and emergency boot system.
For all those cases in fact
the speed of a USB flash drive is unimportant.

For anything else like jwillia3 also already said, I also can only second what cracauer@ already said in several threads about that topic:
If you care for any data even remotely safely stored, or/and any speed at all, get a real drive.
Either some M.2 NVME in USB enclosure, or some SSD drive and a USB to SATA converter.
 
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