How does a hard drive compare to Flash memory working as a hard drive in terms of speed?

Solution 1:

One big difference is that the flash drive is using the USB bus, while the drive is using the SATA bus. So even if your flash memory was the same speed in both cases, the drive would have a higher potential throughput.

Solution 2:

In your case it depends on your USB-port specification (2.0 is much faster, but 1.0 is very slow) and USB-port of your drive. And in case of netbooks they have a fast SSD drives. 'Tis very-very fast.

Solution 3:

As others have pointed out, it depends on the speed of the bus, but for your measured speeds the bus is probably not the bottleneck (assuming you're using USB 2.0). The maximum throughput of USB 2.0 is 480Mbps (60 MB/s).

Flash memory write speeds can vary widely, depending on the particular technology used. Typically, USB flash drives are extremely slow because of the memory type and internal configuration. SSD drives usually address the performance discrepancy by interleaving the memory modules.