I am a long time fan of Sandisk products. I use them almost daily and highly recommend them, by name, to colleagues. I see others are having performance issues also. Tech support and chat have not been any help. There 2 answers are…
1.Format the drive
Copy 1 file at a time
I’ve formatted the drive a few times to either FAT32 or NTFS. Makes no difference. I am a computer technician. When I use my flash drive, I copy whatever a customer needs and that may come in hundreds of files and folders. Copying one file at a time could take hours so this is not a reasonable suggestion. since my customers pay me hourly.
I could actually accept the answer that all 16GB cruzers are that slow but support won’t comment on this. Does anyone know if this is a Sandisk only issue or are other brand’s faster.
I would like to post my test results.
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Sandisk USB flash drive: sdcz36-016g black bl1106wz0b
System: Dell Inspiron 531 desktop.
Specs: Windows 7 Home Premium 32bit will all updates,USB 2.0, AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+, 3.5GB Memory.
Test-file: One folder containing 93 sub-folders, 407 files, total of 6.8GB.
Test1: Copy Test-file from Sandisk to C:\temp folder.
Stats and results: Speed was a steady 13.2MB/sec. Total time 8min 41 seconds.
Per Sandisk Tech support, I formatted the flash drive before Test2.
Test2: Copy Test-file from C:\temp to Sandisk.
Stats and results: Speed constantly goes down. Intervals and speed readings follow.
Time interval Speed in MB/s
1sec 40.8
1 min 10.8
2 min 7.17
5 min 4.93
10 min 4.18
15 min 3.98
20 min 3.90
25 min 3.82
30 min 3.76
32 min 37 sec 3.52 (finish)
this drive is an entry level device and no speed specs are published. typically you can expect 3 to 5MB/s which looks like what you are seeing. if you are interested in speed look at sandisk ultra or extreme line products.
The reason why its fast on the 1st min then suddenly fades away is that windows decreases its speed due to errors. When it detects an error, it needs to resend the data again, at the same time, increasing the window size. Until it goes to a stable speed. Check out “Windowing” in google. I agree, speed is ok.
There are free softwares that provides you a boost in copying data. Teracopy is one of them. You can check it out. i got 3 flash drives here, thy avaerage 3-4Mbps too. I wouldnt worry about it unless if you are tried to transfer enormous files.
I also considered Sandisk as the clear market leader and always favoured Sandisk products over anything else given the choice. However, the Cruser Blade (8GB in my case) is an utter disappointment - it’s slower even than the unbranded give-away sticks I got years ago! The suggestion to go “Ultra” for a comparable performance to the current generic junk is a poor excuse.
I bought a 16 gb cruzer switch yesterday, and a I find the write speed ridiculous (4MB/s).
Just for comparison: I have a 2gb kstone datatraveller and a 4gb maxell pendrive (also entry level, also cheap) and they just provide 7-8MB write speed. I thought that a big brand like sandisk is just gonna be up to the competition.
Unfortunately, SanDisk USB Flash drives are not the same as they were before. I have a SanDisk Cruzer Micro U3 4GB writing at 10 MBytes/s and a SanDisk Cruzer Micro U3 8GB writing at 7 MBytes/s, with constant speed.
Recently, I’ve bought SanDisk Ultra 16GB (it was supposed to have high speed performance) and SanDisk Cruzer 64GB. The both flash drives have the same mediocre writing performance as icmike5 described. I am very disappointed with SanDisk flash drives :( I hope that at least the data storage remains reliable…
sorry but I have to say that is a sad and almost offensive reply… you seem to have left out a third and fourth option - 3) something between your answers and finally the option I am now going to use… another brand other than SanDisk… thanks for your help “SanDisk Guru”…
the above from a long time SanDisk now ex-user and a Macintosh consultant.
I have the same USB Stick with 16GB. I use it as Recovery Stick with Windows, Programms, Tools etc…His High Speed is 10-12MB/s on USB 3.0…to achieve the best Performance format it to exFat like all older USB Sticks Fat32 can you forget…^^
I also considered Sandisk as the clear market leader and always favoured Sandisk products over anything else given the choice. However, the Cruser Blade (8GB in my case) is an utter disappointment - it’s slower even than the unbranded give-away sticks I got years ago! The suggestion to go “Ultra” for a comparable performance to the current generic junk is a poor excuse.
Clearly, Sandisk is not a blind choice any more.
I’ve formatted the drive a few times to either FAT32 or NTFS. Makes no difference. I am a computer technician. When I use my flash drive, I copy whatever a customer needs and that may come in hundreds of files and folders. Copying one file at a time could take hours so this is not a reasonable suggestion. since my customers pay me hourly.
Fat32 can you forget…^^