[Discuss] USB speeds

[Rich Pieri]

Two factors come immediately to mind, neither of which have anything to 
do with the bus.

On Unix, file systems are mounted asynchronously by default.  I've seen 
this cause horrible performance degradation on USB flash media.  Try 
mounting sync instead.

You neglected to specify a block size so dd defaults to 512 byte blocks. 
  This is horribly inefficient.  Try powers of 2 starting at 1MB to find 
an optimal value.

-- 
Rich P.