Transferring Music Files To USB: Why So Slow

[bunnspecial]

Those drives are writing at USB 1.1 speeds. Welcome to 1998!

I've talked a lot here about sometimes playing with old computers, and in particular Macs.

Apple was quick to jump on the USB bandwagon-in fact the argument is out there that the original iMac, which was at least on the outside a "legacy free" computer stripped down to a couple of USB ports, 3.5mm jacks, and a phone and network jack-jump started a lot of the market for USB peripherals.

With that said, Apple seemed for a while to want to keep USB around primarily for low bandwidth peripherals, and wanted people to use Firewire(which is admittedly superior to USB 1.1/2.0 in a lot of ways and FW400 tends to have higher sustained real-world transfer speeds than USB 2.0 despite being slower on paper, but also lined Apple's pockets since they would get royalties on Firewire devices) to move data around. Computers from about 1999 on supported booting via USB, but booting a computer over USB 1.1 is quite a miserable experience. When Apple started shipping computers with USB 2.0 around 2003, they removed the ability to easily boot from it(although you can still do it from the Open Firmware command line). Easy USB booting returned with the switch to Intel in 2006, by which point I think they realized they'd lost the war(despite FW800 being a big step up over USB 2.0, although it was never as popular as even FW400). OS 9 never supported USB 2.0.

I say all this to say that I've done some big file transfers over USB 1.1. It's...not fun...to put it mildly. More than once I've yanked a hard drive and stuck it in another computer temporarily just because 1.1 is such a bottleneck.

 

[andrew_j]

A lesson was certainly learned. The five pack of Deekoo USB's was something like $12 so I guess I shouldn't have expected much. I do have a folder on my desktop with all the sub-folders labeled by artist with the songs I copied from CD's, So if a USB stick failed I could just transfer the songs from the desktop to a new USB stick.And that desktop folder is backed up to a hard drive. I''d hate to lose it as there are probably a hundred CD's worth of songs stored there with the songs I don't like edited out.

Even if it worked quickly guessing they’d just fail quickly too.

 

[OVERKILL]

Careful with no name memory sticks bought from third party Amazon re-sellers, many come infected.
In fact many things like chargers and USB cables can be a source of an attack these days.

Yup, sad state of affairs, but this is quite accurate.