[Solved]Bad Problem with flash drive write speeds

[CtrlAltDel]

I have a fairly modern Dell Inspiron 620 and USB 2.0 ports and am running Linux Mint 14 Cinnamon 64bit.
I also have some okay, I guess, flash drives. One is a San Disk Cruzer Glide 32GB, another is a San Disk Cruzer 16GB, etc...

Well, I decided that I needed to back up some movies and started using the flash drives to do so. It took, no exaggeration, what seemed like 2 hours to back up 32GB worth of movie files. And then I try another flash drive and it was about the same. The very best write speed I could get was 3.8-4.0 MB per second transfer rate.

I, not knowing much about it, thought that was good. Then, I finally run out of flash drives to back up with so, I switch to DVD's and starting making some data disks and saving the movies to those. Wow. The DVD's were blazing hot and getting 17-20 MB per second transfer rates. I was able to save these files to DVD's much, much, much faster than I could to flash drives.

Is that normal? And, if it isn't, how can I fix the transfer speed of the flash drives?

[passerby]

Unfortunately that's pretty normal. Take a look at the Cruzer write speeds here: http://usbspeed.nirsoft.net/
USB flash drives, especially cheaper ones, tend to have low write speeds.

If you're backing up large amounts of data, I strongly suggest a portable or external hard drive instead.
They're much faster, and definitely cheaper per GB.

[CtrlAltDel]

Unfortunately that's pretty normal. Take a look at the Cruzer write speeds here: http://usbspeed.nirsoft.net/
USB flash drives, especially cheaper ones, tend to have low write speeds.

If you're backing up large amounts of data, I strongly suggest a portable or external hard drive instead.
They're much faster, and definitely cheaper per GB.

Thanks, passerby. At least now I realize that it's nothing wrong on my end, except for buying cheap flash drives.

Even the most expensive 3.0 drives were just about even with the write speed of a DVD. I had no idea that DVD's were that much more of an advanced technology than flash drives. Flash drives are struggling to catch up to them, in write speed anyway.