USB stick copy speed

[DanL]

I'm trying to understand my slowness in copying to a USB stick. This stick is USB2, so speed is not optimal, but I'm looking at on the order of an hour to copy 10GB onto it. I always thought that USB2 was supposed to be good for 30-ish MB/s, which is vastly faster than what I'm seeing. I have checked all the speed fixes in https://www.ibeesoft.com/recover-mac/fix-usb-slow-transfer-speed-on-mac.html, and see no room for improvement in those ways. I'm using Monterey on an M1 iMac. Shouldn't i be expecting something a LOT faster? I'm not using the USB bandwidth for anything else simultaneously.

 

[Cory Cooper]

Hello,

Sorry for the delayed response.

The theoretical transfer speed of USB 2.0 is 480 Mbps (60MB/sec). There is a lot of overhead with USB, up to 25-30%. There are also variations for brand of USB stick, other processes, number of files and file sizes, writing to is much slower than reading from, etc.

I have seen some brands of USB sticks take forever to write to, especially USB 2.0.

C

 

[Nuggets]

My USB transfer speed is really slow on my iMac I am running Mac OS Monterey and ideas how to speed it up please, it was ok but now Meh

 

[MacsBug]

Hi Nuggets,

The speed on USB devices will depend on what you're transferring to. Many USB Flash drives have a write speed of 7 - 15 MB/sec vs an external SSD that when connected to USB 3 can transfer at speeds over 500MB.Sec.

 

[Nuggets]

I sorted it out by making VLC my default for films etc instead of Vidio player its much faster now when transferring films to my USB.