Cheap Be 16GB USB3 Flash drive is very fast

Putting this info out there, for anyone in Australia who is interested. Right now, Bigw is selling some USB Flash drives for half-price.

This includes the Be 16GB USB3 stick, at AU$11:

https://www.bigw.com.au/product/be-16-gb-usb-3-0-w313-16/p/5138/

Be is Bigw's internal brand.

I bought one of these yesterday, and this morning used the 'easydd' utility to write an image file to the drive. This utility reports the write speed, and I got 27.8MB/s.

This is phenomenal. Another well-known brand cheap 16GB USB3 Flash drive that I bought a little while ago, gave only about 9MB/s.

Then there's some cheap USB2 drives that are as low as 3 - 5MB/s.

The reason that this is important is that if you are going to run Linux from a USB Flash drive, if the drive gives less than about 7MB/s write speed, you will have very unsatisfactory user experience, very sluggish.

Another important point, that I have reported many times, is that the theoretical read/write speeds of USB2 interfaces is above what these Flash drives are giving, so my Be 16GB USB3 drive will have almost the same speed in a USB2 socket.

Note, this Be drive has an Innostor chip. I have reported on these before. They are very fast, made in Taiwan.

Tags: tech