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?

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[–] MotoAsh@piefed.social 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Only ones that support it. It has a different plug and pins, there is just a port that can take both.

If you're plugging in with a normal USB cable, it could be doing a few other tricks to not use the normal USB way of transferring files, or just a fast enough device (eg: 3.2g2+) to not notice the overhead without a side by side.

Most of the 'tricks' are just usually having a driver or controller chip open up a raw data pipe (the universal serial part of USB) and exposing the drive as ... anything other than removable storage. If the OS doesn't see the drive as removable, it won't do most of the crazy overhead stuff of confirming and validating each transfer.

Also if it's USB4, it can expose the device as just a pcie device (I don't remember if it's native to 4 or has to be an overlap with Thunderbolt but eh), or a DisplayPort data stream. That's how those newfangled docks connect to the host while keeping speed up while the dock has every plug under the sun; they're all devices down stream of the mimic'd pcie endpoint, which gets to blast data over raw.

[–] deranger@sh.itjust.works 1 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

This external drive I have is just USB mass storage. It’s using the USB protocol and shows as removable external storage, same as a flash drive.

Removable storage is not the issue here. There is no significant overhead introduced by having removable storage with USB mass storage protocol.

OP is forced into using MTP which does suck and adds overhead. This is not the “normal” way of transferring to me, that would be USB mass storage.