A Retrospective in Transfer Speeds – Then and Now

Today I found a flash drive I purchase back in January of 2004. I compared that drive performance to a brand new Kingston DataTraveler. I know the theoretical maximum transfer speed of USB 1.1 is 12Mbps per second and USB 2.0 is that of 480Mbps per second – but it’s always fun to get a real world test.

usb flash drive

My real world test came up with the following results.

The “fast drive” from January 2004:

usb benchmark

The “fast drive” of today:

usb benchmark

USB 1.1 Generic drive = .77MBs per second
USB 2.0 Kingston DataTraveler = 12.2MBs per second

WOW – what a huge difference. Putting that into perspective a couple years ago it would take me about 16 minutes to transfer the new Chris Daughtry album to flash, where as today that same transfer would take me about 6 seconds. I guess one is definitely not usable for Readyboost.

This info is nothing new – just interesting to have a retrospective of where we came from.

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