ejecting flash drives

Before hse... gets a chance to respond, my guess would be the cache is small cf the 29GB.

Eject makes sure that the cache is flushed before it considers the drive as being ready to be ejected.

I'll have to test with Flash drives, but with an external HD I get far better performance when caching is enabled.

I'm going to be busy for a while but I'll respond back later this evening with some real testing to do some real world comparison.

I did some testing and got some odd results.

I would expect that when I enable caching, performance would be better than with it turned off. For both an external HD and an external SSD this was true. However, for a flash drive, the times were almost exactly identical.

Test: I copied 20.8 GB of data from an internal NVMe drive. Before each test I rebooted the system so that nothing was cached in the system memory and waited about a minute after getting to the desktop to allow every to settle down.

External HD

Write Caching Enabled: 8 min 31 sec
Write Caching Disabled: 21 min 41 sec

External SSD

Write Caching Enabled: 30 sec
Write Caching Disabled: 49 sec

Flash Drive

Write Caching Enabled: 3 min 20 sec
Write Caching Disabled: 3 min 23 sec

Still not sure why the caching makes no real difference with the flash drive. If I discover anything about that I'll post back.

Without thinking about it too much, I'd say it was that the limiting factor is the Flash drive writing speed - its going flat out in both cases, and much slower than Windows is capable of.

HSE;

Thanks for the results.

Your test seems to confirm what I had found.

Coincidentally, I made another of my periodic copies to the same flash drive today, with write-caching on.

This time: 29.8 gb of data, rather than 29.0 previously; 3 hours 37 minutes today, compared to 3 hours 30 minutes previously. About what I would have guessed. Probably 95% of the files had not changed between the 2 attempts.

I noticed many times during the copy process that the indicated speed per Windows was zero for 8 or 10 seconds at a time.........many times only 3 or 4 files were copied within 15 seconds. All smallish files. This with caching on. I don't recall that this behavior is any different than with caching off.

My flash drive is a 64 gb Kingston "micro", about 5 years old. I don't know the full specs on it. It's one of those drives that is only about the size of a man's thumbnail.......I had used it to hold and play mp3s in my car.

Wow, 3 and half hours. That's not a fast drive .

I've largely given up on flash drives. With the drop is SSD prices lately I got a couple cheap NVMe SSDs and slapped them in some small external cases. As you saw in my results, 30 seconds for 20.8 GB. NOTE: Those were large files. It would be slower if it was a large number of small files, but still way faster than a flash drive.

hsehestedt said:

I've largely given up on flash drives. With the drop is SSD prices lately I got a couple cheap NVMe SSDs and slapped them in some small external cases.

Yep; I hope to never buy another flash drive.

What enclosure and NVMe have you been using successfully as flash replacements?

Thanks for the rep! I had a Samsung 500GB NVMe in an HP laptop. I wanted just a little more room on that machine so I replaced it with a 1TB Seagate Firecuda and put the Samsung in an enclosure. This is the enclosure that I am using:

https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B07TJT6W..._mVCGFb3DCGZZ7

I forgot where I posted this issue. I still have the issue but sometimes I get the message safe to eject and sometimes I don't.
I want it to tell me it is safe. I do not want to set a policy or anything. I am telling the truth I had a 64 GB flash drive and yes this was an issue in Windows 7 also it would do it sometimes. But that 64 GB drive is now dead because I was unable to use the eject I even let it sit for a few hours and it still said it was busy.
I ejected it anyway by pulling it out. Now like I said that 64 GB flash drive is dead. This is why I want it to tell me it is safe to eject.