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?
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…
Understood. I’m also talking about sending a full zip over to the flash drive, then unzipping it on that same flash drive.
Music files are large enough to not get affected by overhead like sending a ton of 1kb files. I see no significant difference in transfer time sending 100 10mb files or a single 1000mb file.
This is a totally different story with actually small files (ie kilobytes). Music downloads are not small, they’re multiple megabytes.