Flash random access write performance

I just bought a new 2GB USB stick, Sandisk Cruzer Micro. I have a Pretec Tiny 256MB since before. I benchmarked these using h2benchw in windows (and seeker in linux, but only for reads).

Now, these two are actually pretty close together in performance, h2benchw reports 0.77 ms access time for the 2GB stick, and 1.77 ms for the 256MB one. Raw read speeds are, according to linux hdparm -tT about 25MB/s for the smaller one, and slightly lower for the Sandisk.


But the real odd difference comes when I set h2benchw up to test random access _write_ performance. Pretec manages ~10ms access time here, whereas the Sandisk comes in at a whopping 132 ms!! Wooha. There faded my hope somewhat of using flash as a faster substitue for disks. X-bit labs says there are faster write access times though, specifically for Apacer HT202 sticks with a 28ms access time for writes. Thats unfortunately still in line with harddisks, so the only real benefit is the read access times, in other words flash will only be great when the ratio of read/writes is heavily biased towards reads. A typical database-load might not perform so well.