Sandisk Cruzer Thumb Drive - Extremely slow transfer rates

Can anyone help me out here? My thumb drive has extremely slow transfer speeds. For example, transferring 2GB worth of files takes it about 10 minutes to finish. My external HDD is able to finish the same task in under 2 minutes!

I'm wondering if this has anything to do with me reformatting it. I think it comes with some of it's own default drivers, but I just did a clean reformat and wiped everything out without realizing.

 

Are you reading from the flash drive, or writing to it?
Flash drives tend to have fairly good read speeds, but very low write speeds, in the ball park of 10-15mbps average.
If you're reading from the drive, there may be a problem. Writing to it... that's the speed I'd expect.

 

Writing. I swear the speeds weren't this slow before.

 

Many small files will take longer to write than a single large file as well

 

I have a sandisk cruzer 4GB stick too, it is not fast at all, your 10mins for 2GB sounds very normal actually. Though if you've reformatted it with different allocation unit size and filesystem, it may decrease performance ofcourse.

Only true if the files aren't cached meanwhile copying or if you do it between two mechanical hdd's. thumb drives are normally around 0.1ms, which yields faster performance with small files.

 

Um, as long as you're copying from a mechanical disk, many smaller files or a very fragmented file will take longer to seek all parts, and therefore longer to copy. You're right that flash drives have better seek times though, so a flash drive to flash drive transfer wouldn't have the same issue.