Slow File Transfer To USB Flashdrive

Most likely this is because of the size of your thumbdrive. 32GB is one of the largest sizes you can get, and flash drives usually are slower the larger they are. Also, there are SLC and MLC (single and multi level cell), SLC has higher speed, MLC has higher capacity. I'm almost certain your drive is a MLC. I would try formatting it using some other allocation sizes (the bigger the better when transferring large files), and see what you get. If the speed is not satisfactory, you may have to return that flash drive for a smaller faster model (it could also be faulty too).

It seems to transfer from the flash drive to my C drive fine. It is when I try copying from my C drive to the flash drive is when I have the speed issues.

Yes that's because the flash drive has different READ and WRITE speeds. The biggest complaint of large MLC flash drives is that the write speed is not very fast, usually alot slower than the read speed.

Im betting the flash drive.  Choose a faster drive like Sandisk, Transcend or PNY.

When I formatted the USB drive I used 4096 sectors. Should I reformat it again with a different sector size?

I believe that is the largest that windows XP can do, and I think Vista can do higher? The last time I tried this is did only get around 20-30% increase in speed.

I am using Windows 2000 Professional at work. Do you think that is the problem?

Doubtful, I'd rule out the computer by taking this drive to another machine and trying to copy another large file. Perhaps a newer Vista machine to totally rule out OS? I'm sure you could walk into a computer store and do this on a display model :D

That was it. I was plugging it into the front port of the computer which wasn't connected to the motherboard. Once I plugged it into the back port which was, the speeds increased dramically.