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Why are USB flash drives so slow then? In terms of small random writes they usually only deliver 2-3 operations per second, while being powered by similar flash memory chips — maybe slightly cheaper and worse ones, but obviously not 1000 times worse.
The answer also lies in the FTL. Thumb drives also have FTL and they even have some Wear Leveling, but it’s very small and dumb compared to SSD FTLs. It has a slow CPU and only a little memory. Thus it doesn’t have place to store a full mapping table for small blocks and thus it translates the positions of big blocks (1-2 megabytes or even bigger) instead. Writes are buffered and then flushed one block at a time; there is a small limit on the number of blocks that can be buffered at once. The limit is usually only between 3 and 6 blocks.
This limit is always sufficient to copy big files to a flash drive formatted in any of common filesystems. One opened block receives metadata and another receives data, then it just moves on. But if you start doing random writes you stop hitting the opened blocks and this is where lags come in.
