Help With Transfer-To-Flash-Drive Speeds

[TKoL]

Tranferring movies to my flash drive is a necessity -- I use my PC for torrenting, but I use my Mac for watching films. However, it takes incredibly long to transfer an 8gig movie to the flash drive.

Now, I keep these torrents on an external hard-drive and then transfer them to my flash drive, so perhaps it's going to be slow no matter what I do, but I hope not, and I hope you guys can help me figure out how to make it faster.

1) Idk how to figure out which of my usb ports is 2.0. I think it's the ones in the back but I'm not sure. I have emachines et 1331-02.

2) Idk how to find the USB 2.0 drivers, or find out if I already have them.

3) I've already followed the advice that you find by googling "make flash drive transfers faster" -- I've formatted it NFTS, gone into Policies and made it Optimized for Performance.

Any help would be appreciated. It's transferring at only like 3 - 5 MB/s, and with 8gig files that takes forever.

[amachan]

Cheap flash drives are cheap -- and slow.

I got a better solution for you though: transfer directly from PC to Mac! Assuming they're both on a wired connection you'll get much faster transfer speeds. There are multiple ways to do this. Here's an Apple support article on connecting to a Windows share: Mac OS X: How to connect to Windows File Sharing (SMB)

I do not suggest using Simple File Sharing. It's braindead.

You could also download FileZilla Server on your PC and set it up to serve files from the external drive, add a user account and presto, you can grab files off your PC via any FTP client.

[awesomeo3000]

Get an external HDD. The speed is waaaay faster. Flash drives I think are more for files and small sized files.

[SuperN3rd]

@TKoL, I see so many issues with what you are trying to do that I don't know where to start.

From what I gather, you have a Windows machine that you use to torrent. That machine has an external HDD that is used as your primary data storage. You cannot remove the drive, as you need to continue to seed the torrents you download. You then wish to transfer a movie at a time to a Mac to watch the movie.

1 & 2) I pulled up the specs on your PC, all of your USB ports are USB 2.0. I'm not sure what you were confused about there.
3) Mac doesn't really do NTFS, so this in itself is an issue. Mac can read from an NTFS filesystem, but not write (at least not natively). This in itself creates an issue. A filesystem fully supported by both is FAT32, but you can't transfer files larger than 4 GiB.

As for your USB being slow, you most likely have a crappy flash drive. I get 30 MB/s write on my USB 2.0 flash drive.

There are a number of alternatives to do this. You could use something like TVersity to stream the movie from your PC to your Mac. This would only be a good option if your network and computer can handle the load. Depending on the quality of the movies, the transcoding (if selected) could stress out your GPU. The other issue is if you're doing this over WiFi, as you'll need to have a good router capable of handling the load.

Another option is to transfer the file from your PC to your Mac. As @amachan suggested, using SMB is an option. Honestly, that is probably your best bet. There are other options, such as creating an ad-hoc network between your PC and your Mac, but those require you to be a bit tech savvy. As for using Filezilla to setup a FTP server, I would suggest against this. FTP will be much slower than a simple network file transfer setup. Additionally, if you are not behind a secure LAN then you are risking exposing your files to snooping neighbors.

[amachan]

Depends on various factors. For throwing around large files like movies, FTP will be just as fast as a network share.

[awesomeo3000]

I agree with that as well. FTP is definitely the fastest.

[Day_Man]

Tranferring movies to my flash drive is a necessity -- I use my PC for torrenting, but I use my Mac for watching films. However, it takes incredibly long to transfer an 8gig movie to the flash drive.

Now, I keep these torrents on an external hard-drive and then transfer them to my flash drive, so perhaps it's going to be slow no matter what I do, but I hope not, and I hope you guys can help me figure out how to make it faster.

1) Idk how to figure out which of my usb ports is 2.0. I think it's the ones in the back but I'm not sure. I have emachines et 1331-02.

2) Idk how to find the USB 2.0 drivers, or find out if I already have them.

3) I've already followed the advice that you find by googling "make flash drive transfers faster" -- I've formatted it NFTS, gone into Policies and made it Optimized for Performance.

Any help would be appreciated. It's transferring at only like 3 - 5 MB/s, and with 8gig files that takes forever.

You could get a good usb 3.0 flash drive and it will optimize your 2.0 ports using a 3.0 on a 2.0 port I can get 22MB/s.

[SuperN3rd]

Depends on various factors. For throwing around large files like movies, FTP will be just as fast as a network share.

I agree with that as well. FTP is definitely the fastest.

I respectfully, disagree. I frequently transfer files from a Windows PC to another Windows PC using the default Windows transfer protocol, i.e. going to the networked drives and dragging and dropping files to and from one computer to another. This method, to the best of my knowledge, uses SMB. While doing this, I was able to fully saturate my Gigabit connection, transferring files at 100+ MB/s

Here's "proof":


As for FTP I have never seen speeds anywhere near that. Admittedly, it has been awhile since I have just used FTP, I usually use SFTP as it is secure FTP. Keeping that in mind, it does have extra overhead associated with it. To give you an idea, though, the fastest I ever saw with SFTP, on the same network, was ~ 20 MB/s. My norm is ~ 10 MB/s (essentially 100 Mbps speeds on a 1 Gbps network). I've also found Filezilla to be slow, in general.

---------- Post added at 09:56 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:53 PM ----------

Hmm, looks like this works differently with Windows to Mac file transfers. According to this:

The order of file transfer speeds using OS X:

FTP - full wire speed, saturates the connection. Reason, no Finder involved.

AFP/SMB - half wire speed maybe a little faster, depends on if it's one big file or many small files. Reason, the Finder.

sftp/scp - half AFP/SMB. Reason, encryption overhead.

[amachan]

I respectfully, disagree. I frequently transfer files from a Windows PC to another Windows PC using the default Windows transfer protocol, i.e. going to the networked drives and dragging and dropping files to and from one computer to another. This method, to the best of my knowledge, uses SMB. While doing this, I was able to fully saturate my Gigabit connection, transferring files at 100+ MB/s

Here's "proof":


As for FTP I have never seen speeds anywhere near that. Admittedly, it has been awhile since I have just used FTP, I usually use SFTP as it is secure FTP. Keeping that in mind, it does have extra overhead associated with it. To give you an idea, though, the fastest I ever saw with SFTP, on the same network, was ~ 20 MB/s. My norm is ~ 10 MB/s (essentially 100 Mbps speeds on a 1 Gbps network). I've also found Filezilla to be slow, in general.

---------- Post added at 09:56 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:53 PM ----------

Hmm, looks like this works differently with Windows to Mac file transfers. According to this:

No point using encryption over the trusted LAN... using FileZilla, FTP any file >50MB or so runs the same speed as drag/drop with network shares on my network. There's nothing inherently slower about the FTP protocol except for the setup/initialization/teardown of new connections/transfers.

I generally just use samba, except for with one of my computers that has something weird going on where samba to one of its drives is slow as hell, yet FTP goes as fast as the drive goes.

[TKoL]

I got a better solution for you though: transfer directly from PC to Mac! Assuming they're both on a wired connection you'll get much faster transfer speeds. There are multiple ways to do this. Here's an Apple support article on connecting to a Windows share: Mac OS X: How to connect to Windows File Sharing (SMB)

My PC is connected by ethernet, the mac is on wireless. Will this still work, and fast?

[minesweeper51]

I would set up a windows file share and access it using the mac computer.

That way, you don't have to download the entire movie before watching it.

[amachan]

My PC is connected by ethernet, the mac is on wireless. Will this still work, and fast?

Not near as fast. In fact, probably pretty slow. However, it would be fast enough for....

---------- Post added at 07:13 AM ---------- Previous post was at 07:12 AM ----------

I would set up a windows file share and access it using the mac computer.

That way, you don't have to download the entire movie before watching it.

This.

This is the way I do it, I don't usually actually copy files around. I just browse my shares and play them directly.

[TKoL]

I read somewhere that you can connect a pc and a mac with an ethernet cable directly, without a router in between. is this true?

[ECH3LON]

Tranferring movies to my flash drive is a necessity -- I use my PC for torrenting, but I use my Mac for watching films. However, it takes incredibly long to transfer an 8gig movie to the flash drive.

Now, I keep these torrents on an external hard-drive and then transfer them to my flash drive, so perhaps it's going to be slow no matter what I do, but I hope not, and I hope you guys can help me figure out how to make it faster.

1) Idk how to figure out which of my usb ports is 2.0. I think it's the ones in the back but I'm not sure. I have emachines et 1331-02.

2) Idk how to find the USB 2.0 drivers, or find out if I already have them.

3) I've already followed the advice that you find by googling "make flash drive transfers faster" -- I've formatted it NFTS, gone into Policies and made it Optimized for Performance.

Any help would be appreciated. It's transferring at only like 3 - 5 MB/s, and with 8gig files that takes forever.

@TKoL

USB 2.0 speeds are going to max out around 20MB/s for quad channel USB flash drives. Most modern USB 2.0 flash drives are still dual channel and are around 10MB/s transfer. USB 2.0 rxternal hard disks are harder to average since I have had crappy ones from 20mb/s to around 100mb/s.

If you wanted to upgrade to usb 3.0 it only costs around $25 as long as you have a PCI slot available. Then adding hardware that could manage that speed will increase the price a bit but for me it was a worthy upgrade.

So speed generally is source - destination (- being the medium of transfer). the speed will be the result of the lowest performing device. In your case I think it might be the medium or partially at least. Upgrading to a usb 3.0 pci card even if it is only for usb 2.0 might be a good choice as it will upgrade the medium of transfer and eliminate any bottlenecks it is causing. Once you have hardware that supports 3.0 you can also upgrade to External HDD, and flash drives that support it.

I read somewhere that you can connect a pc and a mac with an ethernet cable directly, without a router in between. is this true?

Well it is possible, but you need a cheap crossover cable. A crossover cable is basically wired partially in reverse, this is because a standard ethernet cable is wired for 2 different types of devices to talk to each other, but you want the same type of devices to talk to each other so the cable has to be wired differently.

And just Google "How to connect Two computers by crossover" to find a tutorial.

Cheap flash drives are cheap -- and slow.

I got a better solution for you though: transfer directly from PC to Mac! Assuming they're both on a wired connection you'll get much faster transfer speeds. There are multiple ways to do this. Here's an Apple support article on connecting to a Windows share: Mac OS X: How to connect to Windows File Sharing (SMB)

I do not suggest using Simple File Sharing. It's braindead.

You could also download FileZilla Server on your PC and set it up to serve files from the external drive, add a user account and presto, you can grab files off your PC via any FTP client.

This is actually a great solution, transferring via FTP, or other transfer protocols over a local network is probably faster. But I'm more in favor of steaming files as streaming is more on demand.

[SuperN3rd]

@TKoL
Well it is possible, but you need a cheap crossover cable. A crossover cable is basically wired partially in reverse, this is because a standard ethernet cable is wired for 2 different types of devices to talk to each other, but you want the same type of devices to talk to each other so the cable has to be wired differently.

And just Google "How to connect Two computers by crossover" to find a tutorial.

For Windows to Windows, a crossover cable used to be required (before Windows 7?); however, now you can actually just use a normal Ethernet cable, if you know what you are doing. I've done this before. It's a little tricky when you are trying to configure your ad-hoc network, but you can get it to work. With just a pure crossover cable it should be a much more automated process.

Looks like you don't need a crossover cable for PC to Mac, either. Take a look at this article.