Quote:
Originally Posted by OtinG
I think they are so small they have heating issues. They have a limited amount of surface area from which to dissipate the heat adequately. The really small ones are even worse. The Samsung 64GB I tested almost completely disappears when plugged into a USB port on my MacBook Pro. Only about 1/4” sticks out and that partion is plastic. It gets extremely hot. It runs much cooler though when using an adapter cable with my iPad Air 2020. That is probably because the adapter cable port is completely exposed allowing more heat dissipation.
I reformatted the two flash drives I tested to APFS. They both ran about twice as fast with APFS as they did with exFAT. But they both ran way slower on the iPad than on the Mac, and on the ipad they never got near the theoretical top speed for USB 3.0 on a flash drive, which seems to 150MB/s. One got close with 123MB/s on the Mac though.
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Heat isn't really the issue (unless you've been stressing the drive for a long time). You need a good controller and parallelism to hit high speeds. Unfortunately, flash drives usually have neither. Heck, there are plenty of USB3 flash drives that are slower than USB2 HDDs (~40MB/s read/write). I have the same Samsung Fit flash drive. It's just not particularly fast, iirc.
Mind, even on SSDs, once you've run out of pseudo-SLC cache on modern SSDs, 256GB usually have significantly lower write speeds compared to, say, 1TB.
On Windows, I think USB3 tends to top out at ~300MB/s while UASP allows up to ~500MB/s.
I tested a freshly initialized Crucial MX500 2TB with, iirc, a Rosewill USB3-SATA adapter with UASP support. Used this USB-C hub to get USB-A ports.
https://www.amazon.com/uni-USB-Hub-6...dp/B07Q8TRVTN/
Test data is 13.06GB, 51 files. 4 are MP4 movies that are ~3+ GB each. The rest of the files are metadata and artwork (poster, backgrounds, etc).
2020 M1 MacBook Air 8GB/512GB
Crucial MX500 2TB
Read: 302.7 MB/s
Write: 315.3 MB/s
2020 iPad Pro 12.9 256GB
Crucial MX500 2TB
Read: 216.9 MB/s
Write: 166.3 MB/s
I'll add results for the 2017 iPad Pro 12.9 when I find the Lightning-USB3 Camera Adapter.