win7 extremely slow usb transfer speed because of lots of files, not size.

unwashed potato! · 12 Mar 2010 at 23:51

i have had a problem with such ridiculous slow usb transfer speeds for a few months now and never got round to investigating it much as it rarely used usb, however today i have an idea that at 30mb was going to take 35 minutes to transfer i could at least use .7zip to shrink the files to anything smaller to help reduce the time even by 5 minutes. the folder was reduced to 20mb, and amazingly took just 1 second to transfer, suggesting the problem is something to do with how win7 is transferring the many files/folder names which is causing a massive problem.

any one any ideas why this might be happening and a possible fix? this doesn't happen on win xp, just tested on win7, and it happens when putting files onto usb, when taking off, and even when trying to delete files on the usb stick it takes just as long.

Terrier_Jimlad · 13 Mar 2010 at 01:07

1) Does it still happen with AV suite disabled?
2) Try disable "remote differential compression" in add/remove > features (then reboot)

Semple · 13 Mar 2010 at 01:12

That's quite strange even if you was using a USB extension cable you should still get speeds of at least 5-10 Mb/s. I have had one case like this and I think I was extracting a RAR file so the processor usage was going towards the extraction rather than transferring the file.

By any chance are you doing anything on the computer that's taking up a lot of processing power?

theheyes · 13 Mar 2010 at 13:19

Yeah I see this all the time. It is much quicker to transfer one big file than lots of little nested files and folders. I might try and find out why later and if I get an answer I'll post back.

unwashed potato! · 13 Mar 2010 at 13:41

That'll be great if you can. I'll disable ms security essentials when I'm home. And see if that helps. Can't wait to have this fixed