I have a gaming laptop and a phone, both of which have USB 3.2 Gen 2 and Gen 1 ports. I also use a USB 4 Type-C cable. Now, recently, I have downloaded music files of over 300GB. If I transfer them one by one, it takes a lot of time. Today, I compressed the folder to a single zip file, and the transfer finished in less than 20m. Why is that so?
This does not match my experiences. Transferring files over USB would absolutely be faster than sending a zip and unzipping it on a flash drive. I can easily do 300MB/s over USB3.2 when transferring music files.
Unzipping a large file is going to be a bunch of reads and write and the large file is going to transfer at the exact same speed as the smaller music files, which are not “small”, they’re still tens of MB. So, the zip and music files take roughly the same time except now you have to wait to unzip with one large file. It does not save time.
Transferring tens of thousands of 1kb files will slow things down, and I’d zip this, but music files are big enough.
Not zipped to a flash drive. Zipped and sent over the same USB cable as sending the bunch of files.
The actual transfer bandwidth attained does rely a ton on what connection speed gets negotiated. The overhead of how at least Windows deals with USB is very noticeable at lower speeds. 3.1 or less and I can guarantee you the zip option might start looking like a valid choice.
Of course if you get 3.2gen2+ speeds negotiated, it’s going to be ‘fast enough’ either way assuming the devices can deliver on read/write…