Slow transfers in OSX on flash drives

[captain_twinkie]

So I recently got a Macbook from work, and when ever i transfer files on to any flash drive, formated FAT or HFS or HFS+, the transfer is about 2 MB per second, and when I test it on my windows machine, it goes alot faster. And the weird part is if i connect my external hard drive up, it goes fast, so at first I would say that it could be some wierd driver issue, but I doubt that considering it works fine on the external HDD.

Any thoughts?

[Zantor]

Where are you plugging in the flash drive? Having worked with Macs before, I know that the USB ports in the keyboard don't meet the power requirements for some flash drives. Try plugging it straight into the machine rather than into the keyboard to see if it helps.

[captain_twinkie]

Since its a Macbook its in the usb ports on the side of the laptop, ive tried both ports with the same results

[JMEaT]

What version of Mac OSX? If one of the newer flavors, could be Spotlight doing its initial index of the drive.

[captain_twinkie]

It is 10.5.8, and I have tried excluding the drive from spot light.

[TechPro]

Is the drive connecting to the Mac through a USB extender?

[captain_twinkie]

Nope just directly to the port, ive noticed it happens with all 3 of my flash drives, but I noticed today that with all of my flash drives, its just the write is slow, reading is just fine. And read and write is perfectly fine on my external hard drive.

[BUBBALOU]

its just the write is slow, reading is just fine. And read and write is perfectly fine on my external hard drive.

Because it is not a hard drive it is flash memory

NAND & NOR looks like you are experiencing some of the limits write functions of "NOR" FLASH MEMORY

[captain_twinkie]

Then why is using those exact same flash drives, atleast 10x+ faster on my windows machine?

[TechPro]

Does your Mac have an anti-virus program installed?

Any auto-backup, auto-fileprotect, auto file catelog activity?

[captain_twinkie]

Nope, nope, nope and nope

[BUBBALOU]

do you unmount the thumb drives as required by OSX and Linux and Windows - or do you just Pull the PUP out!!!

Is it Formatted Mac OS Extended [Journaled] or HFS+ (Mac OS Extended) .... if not it will cause slowdowns from corrupted partition tables from just unplugging it directly from a PC if formatted in Fat 16 or 32. When you deal with the equipment data bridge between MAC-LINUX and WINDOWS always eject drive or unmount before unplugging ESPECIALLY from Windows.

Format the Drive fat 32 if PC/MAC exchange

Unmount Unmount Unmount ( or in Microsoft talk \"Safely Remove Devices\")

[JMEaT]

What is your Mac's system specs? It does have USB 2.0 ports correct?

[captain_twinkie]

Yes I unmount the drives, tried it HFS+ with and without journaling, and Fat32.

And Yes the system has USB 2.0 Ports, its a 2.13 C2D Ghtz Macbook, with a Geforce 9400.

[Admiral LSD]

I'm not sure if this has anything to do with it because I'm fairly certain Windows disables it on removable drives by default, but could it be Windows write caching giving the false impression that writes are happening faster than or even when they appear to be? If OS X doesn't do any write caching on removable drives then writes would happen to flash drives at the far slower speed of the media rather than a higher speed memory cache. It does sound like something Apple would do, you reduce the chance of the option inadvertantly being switched on and therefore the risk of data loss virtually to zero by simply not having the option at all.