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I routinely move data from my Windows 7 64bit PC to a USB 2.0 (8GB) thumb drive.

I use WINRAR to compress some content and then copy to the thumb drive. I mostly do this because I develop software and I move the development work between work and home.

After dragging the compressed archive to the thumb drive, Windows shows the copying dialog for several seconds; at least 30-40 seconds on average I would say.

Then the actual copying beings, I guess, evident by the progress percent coming to life and moving from left to right. The compressed archive is around 300 MB.

It doesn't seem to matter if the file is compressed or not; just the size.

If I expand the details on the copying dialog, it says it's calculating the various times.

Hoping to see if there are any registry hacks I can use to speed this up or eliminate any post size calculations (at my own risk).

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Guessing: You've got a cheap thumb drive and it's spending 30 seconds erasing a place to put the data before the transfer starts. – Chris S Jul 6 '11 at 1:03
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Thumb drives do not have this kind of logic in them. They simply use the universal mass storage driver in windows, which treats it as a block device. You would need to have a custom driver installed in Windows that wipes before write. The flash drive will never know how much you are ABOUT TO COPY to it. It deals only in little chunks, reads and writes. – Bill Gates Jul 6 '11 at 2:22
the 8GB thumb drive has only 2-3 GB in use so there is plenty of room. My chief complaint has to do with what appears to be a pre-calculation that takes place before the actual copying. I assume the progress bar activity (which is very fast) is the actual copying but this does not happen initially until 30-40 seconds have passed. – Kilo Jul 7 '11 at 2:58
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migrated from serverfault.com Jul 9 '11 at 7:16

This question came from our site for system administrators and desktop support professionals.

2 Answers

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I suspect a virus scanner is unzipping and scanning inside the ZIP file before allowing copy. Turn off the on-access scanning to confirm this. If that's the source of the delay, most virus scanners have options to consider tweaking.

If you are a user on my network I won't let you disable the virus scanner. I would not consider excluding a flash drive letter from scanning (flash drives are one of the most important places to scan), but I might let you do something like "Do not scan *.myz" and you agree to name your files myz instead of zip.

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no virus software is installed on either workstation. Problem is on both computers. – Kilo Jul 7 '11 at 2:59
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up vote 0 down vote

I assume your USB drive has a FAT32 filesystem and you cannot use revision control to host your code [1] or simply transfer the files directly to your home.

It never hurts to ask, do you actually compress the files ? Or are you just archiving them ?

Now for the hacks, I suggest this one: http://www.mydigitallife.info/speed-up-and-optimize-usb-drive-speed-performance-by-enabling-write-caching/

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I actually compress using WINRAR. I have a folder on C: that I right click to create a .RAR file on same C: drive. I then copy this resulting RAR file (~300MB) to my thumb drive. Thumb drive is formatted using NTFS. I'll review the link provided but, again, I don't suspect the actual copying is the problem. It appears as though windows is doing something before actually copying such as checking drive space? Expanding the diaglog shows a time remaining ???? type description as if calculating remaining time and space is taking place. – Kilo Jul 7 '11 at 3:03
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