Following up on my previous post on finding that Linux worked far better than either Windows 7 or 10 on the Tangent Mini PC I'm writing this on, after a few months, I had some files to back up, something like 80gb or so spread out on the Tangent running Debian 9 and the Lenovo laptop I used before that had Windows 7. The backup was to an external drive via a USB 2.0 connection. I started with the newer files on the Tangent and it went very quickly, I had over 50gbs copied in less than an hour with data moving at close to the full USB 2.0 bandwidth of 480mbs constantly with no pauses or errors. Then I still had some files on the Lenovo laptop and using the same connection with less data, it took several hours. Windows would start at around 32mb/s and then after a few minutes the speed would start dropping until it was around 17mb/s and sometimes even slower. No idea why but Windows is especially slow with folders that have numerous files and a bit faster with big files but it never even came close to the somewhat modest speed of USB 2.0, much less USB 3.0 speeds. Ultimately, it is not the big things but the little ones like file transfers and backing up data quickly that are moving me away from Windows into Linux. After the frustrating experience of backing up my old laptop, I felt it was time to move more systems into Linux I put Linux on all my other computers, even if I'm still using Windows 7 on them. I had a Mint 19.2 disk and I did a fresh install onto a USB stick and then cloned it to one of my laptops. I did an update to Mint 19.3 that was over in about 10 minutes and pretty trivial and didn't ever require a reboot. Once it was at 19.3, I was able to update it to Mint 20. That wasn't so easy and took over an hour but everything worked flawlessly in the end end. Compared to a Windows 10 "upgrade", it was painless and it only required one reboot. I cloned that Mint 20 installation onto several different computers and only had an issue on one, waking from hibernation taking an excessive amount of time compared to the same system on other machines. Apart from large file transfers, the other area where Linux shines over Windows 10 is updates. I've never had a Windows update that didn't require at least one, if not several reboots and the Windows update process is highly prioritized over anything else you will be doing with your computer and once it starts, it will be running multiple threads, sometimes over 100, and eat up CPU, memory and network bandwidth. Linux doesn't start the update process until you tell it to and updates can be done without reboots using shell commands, usually just two commands and a few minutes and it's over. I can run my months on end sessions and do updates without rebooting, how nice.
I am NOT trying to dissuade your Linux usage. But for much faster file transfers on Windows may I suggest Teracopy. https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/teracopy.html "TeraCopy is a compact program designed for quickly copying and moving files."
MisterB, 50 GB in 1 hour is... 50*1000 / 3600 = 14 MB/sec 14*8 = 112 mbps How did you get the 480 mbps number? I copied a folder containing 80 GB of data to a USB2 external HD. The time taken in Windows and Linux was almost identical. To the minute. 40 minutes.
Times and data amounts are not exact. I'm being subjective, not doing a structured performance evaluation. Systems used were Debian 9 and Windows 7. Windows 10 might be faster but I'm not going to try it with Windows 10. I have noticed some improvements in several areas with Windows 10 but none of them outweigh the disadvantages of that OS with a sense of control overall and especially with updates being the deciding factor with Linux. The problem with Windows is that there is so much of it that is not documented to the general public and you have to be a developer to understand what really goes on inside of it. And even for developers, there is much that seems to be deliberately obfuscated and made more complicated than it needs to be, not to mention the constant updates and having to relearn things. With Linux, once you learn your way around the command line and file structure, you don't have to relearn a new version of it every few years. 480mpbs is the rated speed of USB 2.0, that's megabits per second, not bytes. The rates reported in megabytes per second were what Windows Explorer and Mate desktop gave to me during the transfer. They are probably not completely accurate and probably faster than the actual data rate. If everything went as fast as USB 2.0 is rated, I should get around 60mb/s if the drive speed is capable of that data rate. I've never gotten over 32 initially in Windows and then it drops to around half of the initial speed. USB 3.0 starts at around 72mb/s and then has the same drop in speed. I've used it in the past but I've grown tired of having to use third party software and workarounds to get Windows to do what it should do out of the box. File copying is basic and should be fast and painless.
