Transferring Music Files To USB: Why So Slow

[DwightFrye]

Like many owners of newer cars, my vehicles only have USB slots instead of CD or cassette players. I have made a half dozen USB sticks full of music that play just fine. But I am making another one now and it is taking an inordinate amount of time to transfer the files to the USB stick. Here's what I am doing:

• I have a Lenovo desktop computer running Windows 10 with 8 GB of RAM
• I am using a program called Exact Audio Copy to extract songs from CD's in the FLAC format. I save them in individual folders on my desktop and labeled by artist
• I have some SeeDete USB2 64GB sticks. I always Format them before transferring any data to them
• The typical size of an album for example with a dozen songs on it is around 500 MB
• In the past, once I had a folder ready with the songs on it, I clicked on the "Send To" feature, chose the USB drive on my desktop and it typically took less than 30 seconds to copy the music folder onto the USB stick

But for the new USB stick that I am transferring music file folders to, it is taking an average of 45 minutes to transfer each one of those (average size) 500 MB files over.
What is wrong and what can I do to fix it ?

 

[JavierH19]

It's probably just a slow usb stick. The writing part is always the slowest, took a long time to put music on my usb from my pc to play in my stereo but i wasn't in a hurry so i didn't care.

 

[Bottom_Feeder]

Could be a few things but my guess is the no-name USB drives.

 

[jws555]

Like many owners of newer cars, my vehicles only have USB slots instead of CD or cassette players. I have made a half dozen USB sticks full of music that play just fine. But I am making another one now and it is taking an inordinate amount of time to transfer the files to the USB stick. Here's what I am doing:

• I have a Lenovo desktop computer running Windows 10 with 8 GB of RAM
• I am using a program called Exact Audio Copy to extract songs from CD's in the FLAC format. I save them in individual folders on my desktop and labeled by artist
• I have some SeeDete USB2 64GB sticks. I always Format them before transferring any data to them
• The typical size of an album for example with a dozen songs on it is around 500 MB
• In the past, once I had a folder ready with the songs on it, I clicked on the "Send To" feature, chose the USB drive on my desktop and it typically took less than 30 seconds to copy the music folder onto the USB stick

But for the new USB stick that I am transferring music file folders to, it is taking an average of 45 minutes to transfer each one of those (average size) 500 MB files over.
What is wrong and what can I do to fix it ?

How long does it take to write a non-music 500 MB folder to one of these drives?

Regards,
John

 

[fsdork]

As a troubleshooting step, go to a reputable store (or their website if easier) who sells known brand names, and buy a different USB drive from a reputable brand (Sandisk, Kingston, etc).

I say this as someone who got a smoking deal on a MicroSD card on Amazon a number of years ago - the size/price was too good to be true.

Even between some reputable brands there can be a huge variance in write speeds. I have some lower-end Verbatim drives at work which are painfully slow to write.

 

[Owen Lucas]

Could be a few things but my guess is the no-name USB drives.

It's probably just a slow usb stick. The writing part is always the slowest, took a long time to put music on my usb from my pc to play in my stereo but i wasn't in a hurry so i didn't care.

Could also be a slow port on your computer such as a USB 1.0 or 2.0 if your machine is older.

• USB 1.0/Low-Speed: 1.5 Megabits per second (Mbps)
• USB 1.1/Full-Speed: 12 Mbps.
• USB 2.0/Hi-Speed: 480 Mbps.
• USB 3.0/SuperSpeed: 5 Gbps.
• USB 3.1/SuperSpeed: 10 Gbps.

Also if you are using a USB cable, it could be a slow cable to connect your drive. Lets say if you have a USB 3.1 external SSD and use a non 3.1 cable, you'll be limited to the lower cables speed. On a large transfer this will take ages.

 

[thescreensavers]

Could also be a slow port on your computer such as a USB 1.0 or 2.0 if your machine is older.

• USB 1.0/Low-Speed: 1.5 Megabits per second (Mbps)
• USB 1.1/Full-Speed: 12 Mbps.
• USB 2.0/Hi-Speed: 480 Mbps.
• USB 3.0/SuperSpeed: 5 Gbps.
• USB 3.1/SuperSpeed: 10 Gbps.

Also if you are using a USB cable, it could be a slow cable to connect your drive. Lets say if you have a USB 3.1 external SSD and use a non 3.1 cable, you'll be limited to the lower cables speed. On a large transfer this will take ages.

I once had to transfer files in a very awkward setting back in 2012, me having a 3.0 drives/3.0 laptop I was used to transferring files very quickly.

This person brought out their flash drive, a USB 1.0 Sandisc cruiser... I already knew we would be there for way longer than I wanted too ugh.

 

[JHZR2]

Try another stick. Is this common on all the sticks/drives you’ve made? Mine transfer much faster…

 

[edhackett]

Could also be a slow port on your computer such as a USB 1.0 or 2.0 if your machine is older.

• USB 1.0/Low-Speed: 1.5 Megabits per second (Mbps)
• USB 1.1/Full-Speed: 12 Mbps.
• USB 2.0/Hi-Speed: 480 Mbps.
• USB 3.0/SuperSpeed: 5 Gbps.
• USB 3.1/SuperSpeed: 10 Gbps.

This is from what I assume is the listing for those drives on Amazon:

Interface: High speed USB 2.0, (backwards compatible to USB 1.0).
Write/Speed: High speed USB2.0, 7MB/S-10MB/S; Read Speed: 16MB/S-20MB/S.

SeeDete 64GB USB Flash Drives

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

Ed

 

[Hall]

Make sure you're using the right USB port. On some machines, one might be USB 3.0 while others are an older, slower spec.

 

[DwightFrye]

The suggestion to try a different USB stick worked. I have several made by SeeDete from Amazon and they transfer quickly. The one that I had trouble with was made by a company named Deekoo, also from Amazon. I bought a 5 pack and the first two worked fine. The files aren't corrupted and the Deekoo USB stick plays fine in my car, but it took a couple of days to transfer about 20 CD's onto it. So I guess I got one bum USB stick in the bunch.

 

[Owen Lucas]

The one that I had trouble with was made by a company named Deekoo, also from Amazon.

I don't think Deekoo actually made the USB drives. A company like that is most likely just branding generic USBs from a budget reseller with NOS chips from 10+ years ago or somehow they have access to the picked over less reliable chips that larger manufacturers rejected. For playing CDs in the car that's great but for family photos I'd stick to SanDisk, Samsung, Lexar, etc.

I personally store my most important info on HDDs. Even if an HDD goes bad, it can be recovered, doing that with a USB is borderline impossible for a consumer.

 

[Pew]

Poor quality USB drive. There's lots of mislabeled ush thumb drive out there, especially with "no-name" brands where they'll say USB3 or have some crazy capacity but in reality are none of those.

 

[Carmudgeon]

Poor quality USB drive. There's lots of mislabeled ush thumb drive out there, especially with "no-name" brands where they'll say USB3 or have some crazy capacity but in reality are none of those.

Yeah, plus I wouldn't trust the free Microcenter drives, corporate-branded swag drives, and cheap drives for any data I don't want to lose.

And flash memory in general, though it can endure (including trips through the laundry for the flash drive you forget to remove from your pocket) isn't intended for archival duty.

Even for legitimate, brand name drives, the marketing touts the high read speeds, but ignores the write speeds, which can be miserably slow on lesser quality drives.

I also use flash drives for media storage in my cars, but even in that application, a good quality drive is desirable because the USB/media hardware in car stereos isn't the most advanced, and can struggle and glitch with cheap drives, at least with the aftermarket units.

I've gravitated toward Samsung drives, which have never let me down. The older Patriot drives were good quality, but they've largely dropped out of that market.

Kingston, despite being a brand name, are mediocre. Sandisk is quite well-known, but their stuff can be hit and miss.

 

[Pew]

I've gravitated toward Samsung drives, which have never let me down. The older Patriot drives were good quality, but they've largely dropped out of that market.

Kingston, despite being a brand name, are mediocre. Sandisk is quite well-known, but their stuff can be hit and miss.

I've had numerous internal and external drives that have failed from Kingston and Sandisk at work to the point that I don't ever buy them anymore. They used to be a pretty decent choice.

 

[javacontour]

Yeah, plus I wouldn't trust the free Microcenter drives, corporate-branded swag drives, and cheap drives for any data I don't want to lose.

And flash memory in general, though it can endure (including trips through the laundry for the flash drive you forget to remove from your pocket) isn't intended for archival duty.

Even for legitimate, brand name drives, the marketing touts the high read speeds, but ignores the write speeds, which can be miserably slow on lesser quality drives.

I also use flash drives for media storage in my cars, but even in that application, a good quality drive is desirable because the USB/media hardware in car stereos isn't the most advanced, and can struggle and glitch with cheap drives, at least with the aftermarket units.

I've gravitated toward Samsung drives, which have never let me down. The older Patriot drives were good quality, but they've largely dropped out of that market.

Kingston, despite being a brand name, are mediocre. Sandisk is quite well-known, but their stuff can be hit and miss.

Yet this application is perfect for such drives. Copying music you are going to listen to in the car is a great use for questionable thumb drives.


If the drive fails, the music is still on the computer.

I've had a few fail read-only in the past 6 months as well as an SSD. Except these had data I didn't want to just toss in the rubbish. So I had to disassemble them and shred them. My shredder will do thumb drives and, if patient enough, the circuit board from a 2.5" form factor SSD.

 

[Bottom_Feeder]

Off-brand drives for data storage, regardless of what type and what you're using it for, is rarely worth the risk of using for anything regardless of how low-impact it would be if it up and died.

Name-brand USB3-certified (not just 'compatible') flash drives is all I'll use nowadays. Life's too short and good media is too cheap to deal with slow transfer rates and flaky behavior.

 

[DwightFrye]

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.

 

[97prizm]

Like many owners of newer cars, my vehicles only have USB slots instead of CD or cassette players. I have made a half dozen USB sticks full of music that play just fine. But I am making another one now and it is taking an inordinate amount of time to transfer the files to the USB stick. Here's what I am doing:

• I have a Lenovo desktop computer running Windows 10 with 8 GB of RAM
• I am using a program called Exact Audio Copy to extract songs from CD's in the FLAC format. I save them in individual folders on my desktop and labeled by artist
• I have some SeeDete USB2 64GB sticks. I always Format them before transferring any data to them
• The typical size of an album for example with a dozen songs on it is around 500 MB
• In the past, once I had a folder ready with the songs on it, I clicked on the "Send To" feature, chose the USB drive on my desktop and it typically took less than 30 seconds to copy the music folder onto the USB stick

But for the new USB stick that I am transferring music file folders to, it is taking an average of 45 minutes to transfer each one of those (average size) 500 MB files over.
What is wrong and what can I do to fix it ?

Look to see if any of the usb ports are blue in color. Those are the high speed usb 3.0 slots. Some computers have multiple usb ports but not all are necessarily high speed.

 

[KrisZ]

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.