On 5/26/11, Kevin K kevink1@fidnet.com wrote:
Though thumb drives are flash, they tend to use a slower flash than what is used in hard drive replacement units.
No actual industry facts for this, but I think the Flash used in thumb drives are not really any slower by nature/design. This is because I see that the fastest SSD currently tend to use 8 channel controllers for 200+ MB/s performance which translate to 20~30MB/sec per channel.
The better USB 2.0 thumb drives can do about 20+ MB, Kingston even has a new one that will supposedly do 70+ when connected via USB 3.0. If we take 8 of these and RAID 0 them which is pretty much what the 8-channel controller is doing, we're looking at pretty similar numbers between the flash cells in thumb drives and "SSD".
I think that many people, when talking about SSD, may be thinking of drives in the form factor of a hard drive. Either 2.5" or 3.5". Which would probably not be called a thumb drive :)
Only because it doesn't come with a USB connector! ;)