dragonsinger ([info]kiwilessa) wrote in [info]macosx,
@ 2007-02-25 13:45:00
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tomato flash
so - the RED people were selling 1GB tomato flash drives at a conference i've just been to - for $22.00 conference special - the boss got 12 for school - one each for the conference attendees and one for each team leader ... and i bought a personal one as well

so sheryl from RED said to reformat mine to mac as it would be faster and so i did ...

here are some interesting results ...

i have both plugged into the computer



and here's what's showing on the desktop



note how mine looks nicer <G>

and then i transferred the same folder of photos to each one using a stopwatch to measure how long it took

5.4MB folder - with subfolders and about 100 photos

to the un-re-formatted one - 1:42:39
to the re-formatted one - 0:5:16

what can i say ...

edited: i tried this the other way round - with the transfer to the mac formated one first and the general formatted one second - results were slightly different ...

to the un-re-formatted one - 1:43:71
to the re-formatted one - 0:6:80




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[info]pir
2007-02-25 12:58 am UTC (link)
Which one did you do first? The data from disk should be at least partially (probably totally if it's only 5.4m) cached after the first copy.

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[info]kiwilessa
2007-02-25 01:04 am UTC (link)
i never thought of that ... let me test it again ... and see what difference it makes ... although - this was the second time i had done it with the same files

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[info]wibbble
2007-02-25 01:06 am UTC (link)
That wouldn't make a significant difference when copying files to a flash drive, surely? The main bottleneck there is going to be the flash memory speed, and apparently Mac OS X's really poor FAT32 drivers.

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[info]kiwilessa
2007-02-25 01:13 am UTC (link)
i'll try this on the pc - i'll transfer the folder via the network and then use the pc formatted one to do the transfer and report back

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[info]wibbble
2007-02-25 01:16 am UTC (link)
That's not likely to tell you anything useful. You can't test the HFS+ one on a PC (unless you've got MacDrive or whatever installed), and the different machines might give very different results.

If both drives are from the same source, the only difference you would expect would be down to the filesystem used. Flash drives tend to ship with FAT32, which is standard for Windows and Mac OS X can happily read and write to it. If HFS+ (Mac OS X's native format) is faster, it's likely just down to better support for the native filesystem in Mac OS X.

When you think about it, that's not really especially surprising.

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[info]0ccam
2007-02-25 04:59 am UTC (link)
I've always thought that the FAT drivers in OS X were speed crippled on purpose. That's why I left my iPod Mac Formatted and bought a copy of Xplay for the occasional time when I want to connect it to our PC.

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[info]kiwilessa
2007-02-25 05:44 am UTC (link)
i don't know really - i tried the transfer on the home pc and it took even longer ...

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[info]0ccam
2007-02-25 06:17 am UTC (link)
Hm. Even with crippled drivers Macs are better.

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[info]cdtpiper
2007-02-25 07:02 pm UTC (link)
when i get the time i'll try the same test but using boot camp on my imac, that way it'll be a really fair test as the hardware is staying exactly the same, only the software is changing :)

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