[SOLVED] Will a better USB drive improve boot media creation times?

Sep 20, 2020
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OK so in the last year or so I've created maybe 10 USB boot drives with either Windows MCT, Rufus, balena and UUI. In any case the amount of time it took to write just a few Gbs of data to the drive was quite substantial, sometimes up to an hour or even more, and sometimes when the image is faulty or not properly burnt you have to repeat the process a couple of times, by that time you might have spent 3 hours looking at loading screens.

I was wondering if getting a USB-C or even just a USB 3.0 drive would improve the time it takes to create the image, since these drives can be written to much faster.

Thanks to everyone in advance.
 
Solution
Needs to be USB 3.0 stick, of course. BUT... 90% (my guess) of USB 3.0 sticks are pure crap.. yes, all those you can get for about $10 or so (no matter what capacity or brand).
Yes, they are usually reasonable fast for reading data from it. But for witting (large files), it can happen it's slower than good USB 2.0 -is my personal experience.
From cheaper ones, I can only recommend Sandisk Extreme GO USB 3.1 -for even better performance ("real" USB 3.1) we should look above $35 or even above $40.

In short, if brand doesn't specify sustained write speed, don't buy it!
OK so in the last year or so I've created maybe 10 USB boot drives with either Windows MCT, Rufus, balena and UUI. In any case the amount of time it took to write just a few Gbs of data to the drive was quite substantial, sometimes up to an hour or even more, and sometimes when the image is faulty or not properly burnt you have to repeat the process a couple of times, by that time you might have spent 3 hours looking at loading screens.

I was wondering if getting a USB-C or even just a USB 3.0 drive would improve the time it takes to create the image, since these drives can be written to much faster.

Thanks to everyone in advance.
Usb3 is much faster than usb2 .....bus speed.....but the limiter may be in the innards of the flash drive as to how well it handles writes.

Read some reviews about different usb3 flash drives and see what they have to say.
 
Needs to be USB 3.0 stick, of course. BUT... 90% (my guess) of USB 3.0 sticks are pure crap.. yes, all those you can get for about $10 or so (no matter what capacity or brand).
Yes, they are usually reasonable fast for reading data from it. But for witting (large files), it can happen it's slower than good USB 2.0 -is my personal experience.
From cheaper ones, I can only recommend Sandisk Extreme GO USB 3.1 -for even better performance ("real" USB 3.1) we should look above $35 or even above $40.

In short, if brand doesn't specify sustained write speed, don't buy it!
 
Solution
Most (if not all) USB drives quote the theoretical maximum speed of the highest USB version (1, 2, 3, 3.1, etc.) that they are compatible with. They will always say "up to" XX GB/s but never get anywhere near that.

There are fast USB drives out there but you will pay a premium for them. I also have a SanDisk Extreme GO USB 3.1 (128GB). It truly is in a league with probably just a dozen other USB drives that truly are FAST.