Slow saving to flash drives!

**speedsixdave** · 13 July 2009, 03:13 PM

Hi all,

Just upgraded from XX4 to XX5. I have XWD too. Long-time user, since XX1.

I work from a USB flash drive quite a lot, over two computers. I noticed with XWD that saving to the flash drive often takes AGES - ten minutes or more - when saving the same file to hard disc takes only seconds. This I have found quite annoying.

This morning I upgraded to XX5, loaded a 1.27MB .xar file from the flash drive, edited it, and saved it. It took over 3 minutes to save! Re-opened it in XX4, edited it, saved it to the flash drive - about 3 seconds to save.

What on earth have you done to XWD and XX5? Why does is take so much longer to save to a flash drive? Can I change something in the settings? I'm afraid this might be a deal-breaker for me otherwise. Not being able to practically save to a USB drive is ridiculous.

Yours in bewilderment,

Dave

**Soquili** · 13 July 2009, 03:17 PM

Originally Posted by speedsixdave

What on earth have you done to XWD and XX5?

Hi Dave,

Welcome to Talkgraphics.

We are all users of Xara programs and not employees of Xara Group Ltd.

We haven't done anything.

Perhaps you may want to open a ticket with Xara Support http://support.xara.com

**handrawn** · 13 July 2009, 03:21 PM

mean time save to hard drive and then copy from hard drive to flash drive ?

[to be honest I would never save directly to flash - too risky]

**speedsixdave** · 13 July 2009, 03:47 PM

Originally Posted by Soquili

We are all users of Xara programs and not employees of Xara Group Ltd.

We haven't done anything.

Sorry, you're quite right of course. I'm just surprised and infuriated by this retrograde step.

handrawn - that's what I've had to do to use XWD effectively. But I'm still not pleased about it.

**a4hire** · 13 July 2009, 03:54 PM

I have had this same problem. I to often use my flash drive to save files. Recently I lost a file that had a lot of work put into it. I dont know if the problem was from X5 , I was using a trial version of that. But since that time I have been using Xareg to make back up copies and I only save to the hard drive and then copy to the flash drive.

**Burpee** · 13 July 2009, 04:00 PM

Is it just .xar files that are taking too long? I recently bought a 250MB Verbatum flash drive and it took over an hour to move less than a gig of information to it. The same information to my MyBook takes 1/10th of the time.

**speedsixdave** · 13 July 2009, 04:06 PM

Originally Posted by Burpee

Is it just .xar files that are taking too long?

.xar and .web, and only from XX5/XWD, not XX4 or earlier. Never had a problem before. Something in the program code has changed!

**Scotty** · 13 July 2009, 04:20 PM

Hi,
I have two flash drives a Lacie 500GB, and a new one I just purchase, SimpleDrive, both these drives are as fast as my Hard drive. One thing I know not all Flash drives are equal, some are at the slower 5400Rpm spin rate and others are at the 7200rpm spin rates maybe you should see what rate yours spin at.
Jim

**ss-kalm** · 13 July 2009, 04:27 PM

Those aren't what I would term Flash drives Jim, I would expect that Dave means a small usb stick type drive.

@Nancy, I'm not surprised that you got less than a gig on a 250MB flash drive. Probably substantially less than a gig ........

**cursor** · 13 July 2009, 04:37 PM

USB storage devices are pretty slow when compared to hard disk drives. From Wikipedia:

Modern flash drives have USB 2.0 connectivity. However, they do not currently use the full 480 Mbit/s (60MB/s) the USB 2.0 Hi-Speed specification supports due to technical limitations inherent in NAND flash. The fastest drives currently available use a dual channel controller, although they still fall considerably short of the transfer rate possible from a current generation hard disk, or the maximum high speed USB throughput.

Typical overall file transfer speeds vary considerably, and should be checked before purchase. Speeds may be given in Mbyte per second, Mbit per second, or optical drive multipliers such as "180X" (180 times 150 KiB per second). Typical fast drives claim to read at up to 30 megabytes/s (MB/s) and write at about half that. Older "USB full speed" 12 Mbit/s devices are limited to a maximum of about 1 MB/s

Writing a 1.27MB .xar file to a flash device should take (at most) a couple of seconds.

Is the slow write-rate consistent, Dave (speedsixdave)?

I just loaded a 1.406MB .xar file into my XX5, then saved it to my USB flash drive. The saving action took 13 seconds.