Speeding up USB ?

Monkey Archive Forums/Digital Discussion/Speeding up USB ?

Paul - Taiphoz(Posted 2013) [#1]
any tips ?

sitting here bored out my skull transfering a 7 gig of art,sound and code my whole projects dir tree basically onto my backup pen, but its slow as hell.

telling it its going to take 3 hours, now I know time is affected by varied file sizes and that it reads 3 hours atm but that will shrink once its gotten through all the annoying small files butis there anything I can do to speed it up more ?

its doing about 600k/s


Why0Why(Posted 2013) [#2]
The only real tip is to check the speed of your drive and USB port. Write speeds can vary by EXTREME amounts. When I am shopping for a drive, I always compare read/write speeds. I have switched over to USB 3 and it is super fast.


rIKmAN(Posted 2013) [#3]
Hit cancel, go about your usual business, start the transfer before you go to bed, wake up and remove usb pen. :)


Paul - Taiphoz(Posted 2013) [#4]
Yeah thats something I do from time to time, just set my power options and screen saver settings to power off in x hours , start the download and then goto bed, the pc with a bit of luck is done downloading before the pc shuts down lol, works most times.

Trouble I have now is that I forget I was doing this and I pulled the pen out, now when I plug it back in the PC locks up and wont let me open the drive, think I might have just borked my pen lol.


Why0Why(Posted 2013) [#5]
I did some large file transfers last night and I thought about this thread. I transferred a 7GB file and while I didn't time it, it was probably 30 seconds or so. That is a fast 64GB USB drive and a USB 3.0 port. I also transferred about 1 GB that had thousands of files and it was under 30 seconds as well.


Xaron(Posted 2013) [#6]
Yep, avoid a lot of small files and use one big. Just zip everything and enjoy the speed.


rIKmAN(Posted 2013) [#7]
So would the time it takes to zip/rar 7gb of files + time to copy to the stick be less than just copying the 7gb in the first place?


Xaron(Posted 2013) [#8]
Yes.


Amon(Posted 2013) [#9]
I've noticed also that transferring lots of small files takes a very long time. I can confirm though that archiving the lot in to 1 or 2 zip archives then transferring is a whole lot faster.


Why0Why(Posted 2013) [#10]
As I stated above, if you have USB 3.0 I can almost guarantee it would be faster to just copy them without zipping.


Skn3(Posted 2013) [#11]
Get an incremtal backup tool so at least you are only copying the files that have changed?


Paul - Taiphoz(Posted 2013) [#12]
Normally I work on regular back ups, and as a result only really backup the changes from the last backup but time thought I was forced to do the lot hence the size.

as for the file's and time, if you think about it, when you copy a single file regardless of the size the OS does a few things, gets file name, gets file size, gets location its moving to, checks for existing file of same name, now this is done quick, but when your working with small files and lots and lots of them, these steps and any other little bits the os does like viral scanning , it all adds up rapidly.

The smaller and more abundant the small files are the longer the transfer will take, a collection of large files but taking up the same total disk space will most defiantly move faster because the OS is only doing those steps a few times as opposed to the hundreds or thousands of times when dealing with small files.