Very Slow USB Boot Mavericks

[beneb]

Hi:

We've created many USB boot drives in the past with no issue. I also consulted the many instructional posts from here about creating a USB boot drive, but with our new Mavericks sticks the boot times are insanely slow and the machine performance after booted is also terrible. Any interactions are followed by 10-20 seconds of the SBBOD. Is there any trick to improved performance? I have tried disabling journaling but that did not seem to make any difference. I am using SanDisk Cruzer 32GB sticks. FWIW, I've never had such horrible performance from USB boot drives in 10.6 - 10.8 using 8GB SanDisk Cruzer sticks. Thanks in advance.

[beneb]

Update:

Got the Mavericks image onto an 8GB stick and the performance is much improved. Something is funny about those 32GB sticks for this purpose. I will let you all know if I find any way to improve the performance on those.

[bentoms]

Are both HFS & GUID Partitioned?

[beneb]

Thanks for the response, yes they are both HFS and GUID. I've also run another test now where I partition the 32GB drive into 4 x 8GB volumes. The 8GB partitions appear to have better performance than the full 32 GB partition. This confuses me, but I will accept it for now in order to move onto other things. I have a feeling that it has to do with SLC vs. MLC but I'm not sure of the details.