Searched around a little and found the Supertalent USB 3.0 Express RC8. It has a SSD controller. Im happy to see that they also posted the USB2 benchmark. It seem to max out the USB2 port at over 35 MB/s even for small files which is what I wanted in the first place. So I guess you need to select more carefully among the cheap memorysticks even if you only have a USB2 port.

I did the same tests with a 11.5GB file. RAID0 was not necessary, an ordinary volume with FAT or NTFS got the same results. Due to some update? I don't know. However the transfer of 1000+ music or image files were crippled, below 5MB/s. I don't have USB3 on this computer. Could you check the average speed you get when copying a folder with 1000+ images.

Because of the many problems with flash memory sticks I wonder if its not better to abandon them as a recommended portable storage for larger devices. Now that we have SSD that are dropping in price couldn't we just buy SSD's in the form of a memory stick?

I kind of liked but haven't tested those dual eSata/USB interface SSD that looks like memory sticks. If they perform well and get cheaper we could easily spread the use of Linux through teaching a detachable dualboot configuration.

[Possibly closer to a solution]

For the fun of it I made a RAID0 volume of two 15GB partitions both on the 32GB USB3 memorystick. ( Use mdadm ). This seems to have solved the speed problem. I got a mean speed of 31MB/s write and 35MB/s read on the USB2 port. The file was over 4GB.

Any thoughts why?

If you look at the graph you see that write isnt stable. From 35MB/s down to 1 MB/s. What I would like to do is to limit the speed somehow to see at what speed it is stable.

I think its accurate the result with file copy gets the same mean speed. Could you help me with usbnet driver under debian squeeze. I don’t know how to get usb0.

Since the USB3 memory sticks are really fast I expect they would maximize the speed of the USB2 port (480Mbit/s). I tried two sticks. With Disk Utility I got a sustained read speed of 40Mbyte/s but when I tried the write I only got around 10Mbyte/s. During write the speed frequently went down to very low after starting at 35Mbyte/s. I tried several of the latest distros and the result were the same.

The plan was to try to set a hard limit on the speed to and from the USB3 device. I didnt find any such commands. Could I tunnel the USB traffic trough a simulated network device I then can traffic shape?