Speed of USB pen drives

I recently bought a Kingston DataTraveler USB pen drive and tried to transfer some big files from a CD to it, and I noticed that the same files are transferred much faster by copying them to the hard drive first and then transferring them to the pen drive, rather than copying them directly from the CD. I thought the slow writing speed of the pen drive would be the bottleneck, so the time to copy them should be identical in both cases, but it's obviously not so: what am I missing here?

A CD Drive is slow to transfer data as compared to a Hard Drive...
A Flash drive is slower than the Hard drive though...

Jerry

Yes, as Jerry said, CD drives are slower than USB flash drives. Also, transferring from 1 device to another could require a bit more negotiation then if you were to just dump it on your hard drive first. There are a few things that could be going on ...

The speeds varies in Writing and Reading from the pendrive. Every flash drive has its own speed, you should check the specs on the package, or test them with some software (can't remember the name of the most popular one, sorry).

Thinking that a flash drive is slower than an HDD is wrong. SSD drives are emerging technologies that are far superior than HDD's in speed, Google is your friend, check some reviews


EDIT:

Things said:

Yes, as Jerry said, CD drives are slower than USB flash drives. Also, transferring from 1 device to another could require a bit more negotiation then if you were to just dump it on your hard drive first. There are a few things that could be going on ...

Click to expand...

What goes on there is that the processor (to put it simply, it doesn't happen just like that) has to buffer what is going from the CD to the SSD. If you copied the CD to the HDD and then from the HDD to the SSD you might be able to do it faster.
Simply put, the processor is having too many interruptions. An interruption happens when it has to pause a process to give priority to another one. For example, everytime you move your mouse you create an interruption.

Most pen drives will not keep up with a harddrive when it comes to sustained read or write speed, but access times are generally faster. So it does depend on what you are storing too - loads of little files or just a few big ones.