I have a gaming laptop and a phone, both of which have USB 3.2 Gen 2 and Gen 1 ports. I also use a USB 4 Type-C cable. Now, recently, I have downloaded music files of over 300GB. If I transfer them one by one, it takes a lot of time. Today, I compressed the folder to a single zip file, and the transfer finished in less than 20m. Why is that so?

  • Freakazoid@lemmy.mlEnglish
    27·
    9 days ago

    It has probably something to do with the large quantities of individual files.

    It works through the list of files one by one. The indexing, writing and checking of individual files takes longer than one single .zip file. Thus zipping them first increases the overall speed.

    • deranger@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      21·
      9 days ago

      Isn’t this just going to be happen when the zip is decompressed, thus not saving time? I would actually expect it to be worse, since now you’re reading and writing from the same drive instead of reading from one, and writing it to another.