Originally Posted by
Jhieminga
I bought a couple of cheap USB thumbdrives the other day looking for an easy way to get some files to friends. Turns out that copying 8GB of photos is going to take most of a working day due to the fact I got USB 2.0 drives.... I'm stuck with them now as I'm not going to buy new ones but I will need to plan the copying bit so that it runs during the night for example.
Bottom line: get USB3 drives next time!
USB3 is 10x faster so well worth going for.
However, USB2 speed is 480 Mbps (Mega bits per second) or approximately 48 Mega Bytes per second. It should therefore be possible to transfer 8GB in about 3 minutes over USB2.
..but Windows is really slow at copying lots and lots of files between disks. Even allowing for the compression and expansion it can be much quicker to zip all the files into a single archive file and then copy that file to the memory stick. If the files are already compressed (eg jpg images), or if you have plenty of space then set compression to 'off' when you create the archive which speeds things up a bit more.