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And with enough capacity, you can do the same for Mac OS X. One very useful application for flash drives is creating a bootable system drive, especially for Linux distributions, as USB 2.0 is much faster than CD-R or DVD-R. 1 specification, which can achieve 5x the throughput (1.5 Gbps or 150 MBps) of USB 2.0. Still, with their increasing capacity and decreasing prices, flash drives are often the best way to move files from one computer to another – unless the machines are on the same Gigabit (1000 Mbps) ethernet network. Flash drives really stepped forward when they embraced USB 2.0, allowing 40x as fast data transfer speeds.Īccording to Wikipedia, USB 2.0 flash drives achieve read speeds as high as 280 Mbps (about 30 MBps) – and writing to the drive is about half as fast.
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The first 8 MB flash drive was still far faster than a floppy disk and had over 5x the capacity. The first USB flash drives arrived in 2000, but they were USB 1.1 devices. The best measured read speed I’ve found for a USB 2.0 flash drive is 30.7 MBps with 25 MBps writes. In short, USB flash drive read speeds are at best 2/3 of total bandwidth, and write speeds may be half that – or worse. USB 2.0, on the other hand, tops out at about 320 Mbps (40 MBps in theory) and puts more demands on the computer’s resources. While FireWire was originally rated at 400 Mbps (50 MBps), because it had far less overhead, it was able to achieve speeds very close to that. Unfortunately for Mac users, Apple held off on supporting USB 2.0 until 2003, instead pushing its faster, technologically superior FireWire protocol. That meant faster printing and scanning, and much better hard drive performance – up to 40 times as fast! To this day there are a lot of USB 2.0 hard drives, external optical drives, and thumb drives available. In addition to low bandwidth 1.5 Mbps and “full bandwidth” 12 Mbps of USB 1.1, it added a 480 Mbps hi-speed protocol. Enter USB 2.0Įverything changed when USB 2.0 was introduced in April 2000. Further, because of protocol overhead, the maximum throughput over USB 1.1 was about 8 Mbps (1 MBps), a far cry from the 10 MBps SCSI Macs had used for years or the 16 MBps EIDE hard drive interface common in those days. That’s fast for a mouse or keyboard, decent for a printer or scanner, but abysmally slow for a hard drive. The G3 iMacs and other computers of the era supported USB 1.1, which has a bandwidth of 12 Mbps (Megabits per second, or 1.5 MBps ). Anyone who wanted to sell a printer, scanner, hard drive, mouse, keyboard, or touch tablet to iMac owners would have to embrace USB.
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While the PC world was content to add USB as one more port in addition to parallel and serial ports, the iMac dispensed with legacy ports in favor of a USB-only architecture. USB has been around since 1996, but it didn’t come into its own until Apple unveiled the first iMac in May 1998.