any way to speed up transfer rates?

[Rÿcher]

I'm sending files to a USB jump drive and it's taking forever. The jump drive is 16 GB and the file folder is nearly 13 GB. I'll sit there watching the progress timer and it'll go down from like 6 minutes 45 seconds to 7 minutes 10 seconds and then back down to 6 minutes something...

I shut off most of the things running in the background thinking that would make a difference but it isn't really. there's no spyware or adware or viruses on my computer and my computer is supposed to be a pretty fast one.

 

[Alpha_Geek]

USB 2.0 is about 400 Mbit. You're copying 13000 Megabytes, or 104000 Megabits.

104000/400 = 260 seconds, or 4.3 minutes in a perfect world.

Unfortunately, the world ain't perfect. In addition to writing the copied data, the PC is busy updating your flash drives sirectory and FAT so it can find the data on the drive later.

You can always wait for USB 3.0, but your old flash drive will only run at 2.0 speeds.

 

[msbae]

You might try defragging your drives next time before transferring such large files. Also, be sure the Thumb drive is plugged into the computer directly instead of a USB Port Hub. In my experience, that will speed things up a lot.

 

[spinnerlys]

Also take into account, that real world USB 2.0 speed is about 35 MB/s at peaks, as USB can't sustain a constant high data rate like IEEE 1394/Firewire, so it's like 20 MB/s (11.1 minutes for 13GB, theoretically). And your flash drive might not be able to write those "high" data rate, as most flash based thumb drives are around 12 to 20 MB/s. Except you have a really good one (professional and not consumer.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

If all you're doing is syncing some files between your computer and flash drive, use a sync tool like the one described here. That will make it more efficient. I assume you aren't actually updating all 13GB worth of files at once, right? There's no need to copy the entire thing over if you only changed a handful of files.

 

[JustAFriend]

Another great FREE and tiny pathsync'ing utility: PathSync

Works on any drive or across a network. I use it to keep my photos, mp3s and other files sync'ed on the computers in my home.