Why is USB-sticks so much slower than Solid State Drives?

Posted by Jonas on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Jonas
Published on 2011-03-05T15:00:31Z Indexed on 2011/03/05 15:27 UTC
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ssd

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speed

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storage

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usb-flash-drive

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usb-storage

From what I understand, USB flash memory and Solid State Drives are based on similar technologies, NAND flash memory.

But USB-sticks is usually quite slow with a read and write speed of 5-10MB per second while Solid State Drives usually is very fast, usually 100-570MB per second.

Why are Solid State Drives so much faster than USB-sticks? And why isn't USB-sticks faster than 5-10MB per second?

Is it simply that SSD-drives uses parallel access to the NAND flash memory or are there other reasons?

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