Unbearably slow USB transfer

[DaveParticipant]

Hi chaps,

Did a few multi-track recordings recently, 18 channels directly to a USB 3.0 hard disk.

Anyone know why transferring the files off the drive to computer is painfully slow?

I get about 6mb/second when copying to both my Windows 7 laptop AND my Macbook Pro which is pretty unacceptable in this day and age!

[Dick ReesParticipant]

1. Were all the sessions on the disc together or did you follow the recommended procedure of one session at a time?

2. Which brand/model of hard disc?

[John-BParticipant]

For the MacBook Pro, most likely because it’s simultaneously converting the files from Fat 32 to HFS+ (default Mac OS 10) for Windows 7, maybe re-writing the files to another format? I remember transferring an 18 track section to my 2012 Mac Pro, and it basically took real time.

[robbocurryParticipant]

If you have usb3.0 on your pc and it’s that slow, update your drive and port firmware & drivers.
If your Mac doesn’t have usb 3 the fastest way to get the files is via gigabit Ethernet file sharing from PC to Mac.
Also if you copy all files at once as opposed to one at a time, it will appear to take a lot longer!

[[XAP]BobParticipant]

The files are interleaved as well, so the drive might just be thrashing to find stuff all the time – whatever you do!

I don’t find that it takes too long to copy the files of my stick – but decent USB Solid State devices can take some serious speed…

[SteffenRParticipant]

6 MB… it seems that you are using USB 2.0 ports to transfer…

[AndreasModerator]

When you copy a group of files between physical drives, particularly on the Mac, ensure they’re copied in series and not in parallel. When copying files concurrently, the drive is seeking its heads most of the time…

[MarkPAmanParticipant]

“Also if you copy all files at once as opposed to one at a time, it will appear to take a lot longer!”

I’ve had to move a lot of short video files about at work recently. According to my experiments, it does take quite a lot longer to do them all together, provided of course, that you’re ready to start each one when doing it one at a time.

Starting them all and going for a coffee can work too though………..

[[XAP]BobParticipant]

Doing a command line based transfer will do it sequentially – so that much be a better option than using some WIMP interface…

[LouParticipant]

Mine is not slow, on an i7 iMac. About 5 minutes for 20 Gigs via USB3 with Sandisk Extreme. Don’t know why yours is so slow, but it is not normal.

[AndreasModerator]

@Lou: …FlashDrives to not have moving heads like HDDs, they’re naturally much faster if data is not contiguous or multiple streams are copied in parallel…

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