Writing to USB flash pen drive posible at speed 4 MB/sec !!!

[robertsu]

I read your "USB 2.0 Hi-speed Flash drive review" at ars technica www page and look for writing speeds are too slow against read speed.
I read at the etc. Lexmark web which pen drive I have USB Pro2 256MB page for example and see in pen drive specifications ..: 4MB/sec write speed and 6MB/sec read speed. When I check read speed that's correct but when I try to record then I get result's like You too... But I looking for that 4MB writing speed and.... may be found something interesting but I don't know how to explain exactly. I found how to write to pen drive with 4MB/sec ! I do this: I found for example one file with 30 MB .mpg file which is already compressed in one folder and try to .zip pack directly in to my pen drive ( I get 29MB .zip file) and that file which is packed and was written for few seconds in to the pen drive. If I try to write that .mpg file directly to pen drive without packing then for that I need almoust 1 min to write 30MB !!
I'm interested in that, why pen drive can write 4MB/sec only when I pack directly in to drive?

[escherplex]

So an .mpg media file if compressed into some .zip file transfers to a USB flash drive faster than the same .mpg file transfers to the same drive but not .zip-ed. As I recall, aren't .zip files essentially hex code, which transferrs faster than streaming binary (which I believe is the way a raw .mpg would be copied)? But you can also lose information, which is why you use BIN when transferring .jpg-s and ASCII when transferring .html-s via FTP to a remote server. IMHO, anyway.

[robertsu]

Yes, so if I can use ziped files that will not be problem and when I copy 200MB's will be much faster to copy in drive.