USB Flash Drive Question

D

_Durandal_

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 19, 2003
Messages
352
A client of mine asked an interesting question today that, when tested, clearly presented itself. I could only guess at the reason why...see below:

Example 1:
The user has 1GB of files to transfer to their flash drive. In total, there are three files (let's say they are game patches for this example). The transfer completes over a USB 2.0 connection in about 2-3 minutes.

Example 2:
The user still has 1GB of files to transfer to their flash drive. This time, however, there are over 10,000 files to be transferred. The transfer process claims it will take over two hours to complete (again using a USB 2.0 connection), and the progress bar moves extremely slow (thus indicating that it may very well take the full two hours).

So, my question is, does Example 2 take longer because there is constant Read/Write access on the flash drive itself? Or, is it because of how Windows XP deals with small file transfers?

I just found it odd that both examples had the same physical size, yet Example 2 took considerably longer. Any ideas?

Thanks!
 
My guess is the latter of the two.
Of course this is a strong guess at best.
 
I have thousands of smaller than 1k text files. They take up more space on the disk than their actual size.

Example:
Code: 
Size: 72 bytes (72 bytes)
Size on disk: 4.00 KB (4,096 bytes)

Multiply this thousands of times, and you have a problem. I think the reason for this is because the info about the file takes up more space than the file itself. I could be terribly wrong.

Maybe placing all of them into one big archive would solve this problem of taking so long to transfer. The file system wouldn't have to worry about all the tiny files. Of course, this is if you have the space.
 
Hey guys, thanks for the informative responses! Sorry I didn't post back sooner. I did want to follow up with one final question on this topic though. Why would a USB hard drive transfer those same 10,000+ files in 5-10 minutes (at most) to another HDD on the PC?

Again, I'm assuming here, but is it due to how each device handles IO requests? It's funny, I can normally answer his questions about anything hardware related, but USB transfers are not my specialty :D.
 
MeadowP said:
I have thousands of smaller than 1k text files. They take up more space on the disk than their actual size.

Example:
Code: 
Size: 72 bytes (72 bytes)
Size on disk: 4.00 KB (4,096 bytes)

Multiply this thousands of times, and you have a problem. I think the reason for this is because the info about the file takes up more space than the file itself. I could be terribly wrong.

Maybe placing all of them into one big archive would solve this problem of taking so long to transfer. The file system wouldn't have to worry about all the tiny files. Of course, this is if you have the space.
Click to expand...


As I understand it, hard drive space is divided into, lets call them blocks, for management issues or something along those lines. Your hard drive, each block is 4KB. Even if an individual file is under 4KB, it's still going to take up those 4KB worth of space for a reason I don't know but I'm sure is findable somewhere.

It is possible to change the size of these blocks, I don't remember where I've seen it but I know I've seen it, maybe it's something you want to look into.
 
General Crespin said:
As I understand it, hard drive space is divided into, lets call them blocks, for management issues or something along those lines. Your hard drive, each block is 4KB. Even if an individual file is under 4KB, it's still going to take up those 4KB worth of space for a reason I don't know but I'm sure is findable somewhere.
Click to expand...
That's what I've always been told. As I recall, one of the advantages of FAT32 over FAT16 was the smaller size of these blocks when formatting large hard drives, resulting in less waste. Although, clearly there is still plenty.
 
Out of curiosity, which usb flash drive is it?

I think transferring multiple files will still take a bit longer than a single, similarly sized file. The reason is, i think, and someone mentioned this above, that it has to store the info of the file... so theres more overhead as the number of files increases.

The reason its much slower with USB flash drives is because of the file system, I believe. I think it also has to do with the controller on the usb drive. I have a sandisk 1gb cruzer mini, and my coworker has a pny attache 1gb. Both drives are USB2.0, and it takes about the same amount of time on each to transfer a 500mb file (the pny is slightly slower). Though, when transferring multiple files, the PNY takes significantly longer (on the order of 4x slower, depending on the total file size) than my Sandisk.
 
I just bought a 4GB PNY attache usb drive. Are these considered reliable? Are the transfer times bareable? Could I watch a tv show episode from the drive onto a computer its plugged into?
 
enginurd said:
Out of curiosity, which usb flash drive is it?

I think transferring multiple files will still take a bit longer than a single, similarly sized file. The reason is, i think, and someone mentioned this above, that it has to store the info of the file... so theres more overhead as the number of files increases.

The reason its much slower with USB flash drives is because of the file system, I believe. I think it also has to do with the controller on the usb drive. I have a sandisk 1gb cruzer mini, and my coworker has a pny attache 1gb. Both drives are USB2.0, and it takes about the same amount of time on each to transfer a 500mb file (the pny is slightly slower). Though, when transferring multiple files, the PNY takes significantly longer (on the order of 4x slower, depending on the total file size) than my Sandisk.
Click to expand...
Well, my flash drive is made by Lexar, and my friend's is a Memorex if I recall correctly. So, the controller on a USB HDD w/ perhaps extra cache, etc. might aid in faster transfers? Hopefully I'm understanding you correctly. Otherwise, the idea of FAT32 vs NTFS file system seems like a very reasonable explanation.
 
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