Thumb drive transfer speeds - win9x/me vs xp \ VOGONS

Thumb drive transfer speeds - win9x/me vs xp

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First post, by Cobra42898

Posted on 2021-03-22, 13:19

Cobra42898 Offline

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I was recently transferring a bunch of mp3s and movies from some old PCs to a different (newer) pc. One was a 500mhz p3, on a 440bx, running xp, and the other was a 400mhz p2 on a 440zx, running winme.

The xp box was noticeably faster moving files onto the thumb drives.

I've read here about network speeds being better on xp, but not USB thumb drives. All scenarios should be able to max out usb 1.1 speed, shouldn't they? Seems there should be less issues than worrying about network cards and resource allocation.
Am I missing anything?

Last edited by Cobra42898 on 2021-03-23, 01:08. Edited 1 time in total.

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Reply 1 of 2, by Standard Def Steve

Posted on 2021-03-22, 16:22

Standard Def Steve Offline

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I actually noticed a difference in USB 2.0 performance when I first upgraded to Win10, going from 38 MB/s (Win7) to 42 MB/s (Win10). Yet USB 3.0, which was limited by the speed of my external HDD rather than the interface itself, performed identically under both operating systems.

So I absolutely wouldn't be surprised if XP has some trick up its sleeve to squeeze a bit more performance out of interface-bound scenarios like USB 1.1. Remember: every stack sucked in Win9x, not just the networking one. 😜

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Reply 2 of 2, by gerry

Posted on 2021-03-22, 16:30

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An interesting observation, i think I've found similar examples between some P3 era machines with usb 1.1 but not with such otherwise closely matched motherboards so i never thought about the OS as potential difference. maybe there is a subtle hardware difference, but there may be some fundamental difference in the way xp handles transfers. Would be interesting to know why

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