Why does downloading to flash memory over USB seem to be disastrously slower than to the hard drive?
I was downloading a file from rapidshare.com using the Firefox addon DownThemAll. First I tried downloading directly to my USB flash drive over USB 2.0, which has a theoretical bandwidth of 480 Mbit/s, but the download got stuck at about 20 kb/s.
When I tried downloading the same file to a different location, /tmp
on the hard drive, the download easily reached speeds of over 1MB/s.
How can you explain this difference if the bottleneck can't possibly be the USB 2.0 bus?