Connecting 2 computers together via USB type-C table?

Pawnless Endgame

Pawnless Endgame

Pawnless Endgame

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I'm posting it in this section as I think my query is more software than the general hardware or networks section.

I have a laptop and a desktop and they can both take type-C. If I have a USB cable with type-C at both ends, what happens if I connect the 2 computers together using it? Both are running Windows 11. I'm hoping that they can see each other in some shape or form and it would be a quicker way to copy files from desktop to laptop. Is there software, part of Windows or otherwise that can do this if it can't be done natively?

At the moment, I use a large USB stick to backup 350GB of data between the machines. The purpose of this is to have my laptop with my current data snapshot for when I go on city breaks. At the moment, it takes about 8 hours to copy from desktop to the USB stick, but once it's all on the stick, it only takes about 20 minutes to copy from USB onto the laptop! All connections are USB 3.0 and both machines have SSDs. I just want to somehow make the 8-hour stage a tad shorter!
 
I'm not sure it would work, Windows is never that easy. :D

Buy a faster USB drive, or even consider an M.2 drive in a USB-C enclosure.
 
Does your laptop have an ethernet port? If so connect the two with an ethernet cable - you "may" need a crossover cable depending on the age of the network ports.
 
Do a speed test on your USB drive. I expect the write speed is significantly slower than your read speed, and that is where the time is being spent.

That will then determine if you swap to a faster USB, a different kind of device, or make a network to go direct from PC to laptop
 
Pawnless Endgame said:
Thanks @darael - I think I'm already using a fast (3.0) drive, Sandisk Ultra Fit, but I didn't know that M.2 could be used externally, so I'll look into that.
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I have a 32GB version of that drive and an M.2 drive in a USB-C enclosure would knock the stuffing out of it, especially in terms of speed. As an example, I just copied 28GB of data in 45 seconds to my M.2 drive in a USB-C enclosure.

With the price of M.2 drives these days, especially on Member's Market, it would be a very wise investment.
 
Thanks for the Q&A's peeps :-) Yes both machines take ethernet so I'll look at that, and will also look into incremental backups. I already have a Synology drive that does daily incremental backups from my desktop which is slow over the network (but effective) and was just looking for a quick data copy method between desktop and laptop every time I take the laptop away with me on a city break or when back at parents etc.
 
Pawnless Endgame said:
I'm posting it in this section as I think my query is more software than the general hardware or networks section.

I have a laptop and a desktop and they can both take type-C. If I have a USB cable with type-C at both ends, what happens if I connect the 2 computers together using it? Both are running Windows 11. I'm hoping that they can see each other in some shape or form and it would be a quicker way to copy files from desktop to laptop. Is there software, part of Windows or otherwise that can do this if it can't be done natively?

At the moment, I use a large USB stick to backup 350GB of data between the machines. The purpose of this is to have my laptop with my current data snapshot for when I go on city breaks. At the moment, it takes about 8 hours to copy from desktop to the USB stick, but once it's all on the stick, it only takes about 20 minutes to copy from USB onto the laptop! All connections are USB 3.0 and both machines have SSDs. I just want to somehow make the 8-hour stage a tad shorter!
Click to expand...

Don't faff around with trying to join them with USB, that's not what it's made for. Network them together Ethernet cables are cheap, and you'd only need a basic 1GbE switch - that'll be the best speed you can achieve short of taking the drive out and plugging it in directly on the target machine.
 
Semple said:
Don't faff around with trying to join them with USB, that's not what it's made for. Network them together Ethernet cables are cheap, and you'd only need a basic 1GbE switch - that'll be the best speed you can achieve short of taking the drive out and plugging it in directly on the target machine.
Click to expand...

Glad someone finally suggested this, mind boggles why he is trying to connect them with a USB cable
 
Haze said:
Glad someone finally suggested this, mind boggles why he is trying to connect them with a USB cable
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Even ethernet cables and switch is unnecessary, just use WiFi as I presume both are on the same LAN.

If they are on the same network, just share the folder you want on your source device, then use robocopy (built in command line utility in windows) to do whatever sort of copy you require. I use it all the time to do a mirror, which only moves the new/changed files (with an option to delete or retain additional files found in the destination location. Don't waste time with anything else, just Google this for a few minutes and you'll be away.
 
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If speed is you goal, take a drive out of one machine and put it in caddy and USB C it.

If ease is your goal you just need a single network cable to connect the hosts.

Assign static IPs on the same subnet to each nic, setup share on one then \\10.0.0.1\share (or whatever) and done.

You don't need a switch, Gbe NICs are auto sensing so you don't even need a crossover cable.
 
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As some others have said, I think using a couple ethernet ports, a crossover cable and setting a couple private IPs might be the simplest solution. You could kick off a copy and simply leave it running.

Afraid not had any experience using any USB direct connections, and had very little experience of Win11 and trying to stick with 10 as long as I can.
 
The only problem with gigabit ethernet is that 350GB would take an hour minimum at full speed (which it probably won't do if there are lots of files). An external USB-C caddy is faster, but you're creating another step (or another backup?). USB's generally for connecting peripherals, but back in the day a company called Laplink used to write software that could do PC to PC transfers. I haven't come across them for 20+ years, but might be worth a look.
 
Thanks everyone for the suggestions. In the end, I went down the m.2 + enclosure route. Windows 11 weirdly enough picked it up as a SCSI drive once initiated in Computer Management, then gave the option of either MBR or GPT. I went for MBR as it's better supported. The 1TB m.2 formatted as 931GB and a disk-to-disk copy took 25 minutes, so pretty happy with that.
 
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