Transfer speeds are technically determined by the slowest of two, sometimes

three factors - the USB version used and the speed in which the USB
controller device can read and write data onto the flash memory. Third factor
is the speed of the hardware bus, in the case of add-on USB ports.

USB flash drives usually specify their read and write speeds in megabytes per
second (MB/s); read speed is usually faster. These speeds are for optimal
conditions; real-world speeds are usually slower. In particular, circumstances
that often lead to speeds much lower than advertised are transfer
(particularly writing) of many small files rather than a few very large ones,
and mixed reading and writing to the same device.

In a typical well-conducted review of a number of high-performance USB 3.0

drives, a drive that could read large files at 68 MB/s and write at 46 MB/s,
could only manage 14 MB/s and 0.3 MB/s with many small files. When
combining streaming reads and writes the speed of another drive, that could
read at 92 MB/s and write at 70 MB/s, was 8 MB/s. These differences differ
radically from one drive to another; some drives could write small files at
over 10% of the speed for large ones. The examples given are chosen to
illustrate extremes.[52]