I understand the difference between SSD and Hard Drive for why SSD writes and retrieves much faster, but what other factors govern how fast files are transferred both locally on a single machine or from a USB drive to a computer's local drive? What are the effects of the processor and other system specs?
1 Answer
It is mainly down to bus speeds and whether the ports you are transferring between are on the same controller.
e.g. If you have two SATA disks connected to S1 and S2 and transfer a file between the two you will not get the full (up to) 6Gb/s because the controller has to switch between the two devices. Unlike copying between SATA and, say, USB 3.0.
The transfer will go as fast as the slowest device involved in the transfer.
USB versions also make a difference.
Your question is very broad so you should do some of your own reading up...