These days you want peripherals to have USB2 connections, which are theoretically 25x faster than the original USB spec. I am, for example, ticked off that my Canon S1iS camera uses slow USB -- transferring a gig of photos takes a long time.
But not all USB2 devices are created equally. I recently tested two MP3 players, both with USB2, to see if there is a difference, and if the difference mattered.
(One MP3 player is the 20GB Innoplus PhotoTainer that's now a couple years old. The other is the 5GB Creative Zen Micro that's relatively new on the market. I transferred a folder of music files holding 1.14GB of MP3 files.)
Results
* PhotoTainer transfers 1.14GB in 1 min 42 sec = 680MB/min
* Zen Micro transfers it in 6 min 40 sec = 170MB/min
The PhotoTainer is at spec, but the Zen Micro is below spec. Even though both claim to have the speed of USB2, the Zen Micro is 4x slower. Additional tests with two other groups of files confirmed the speeds are roughly correct.
Analysis
So why is the Zen Micro so slow? My guess is that these factors could be involved:
1. The software used to transfer files. The PhotoTainer uses Windows Explorer, while the Zen Micro must use proprietary software. (I used Red Chair's Notmad software, which claims to be 20% faster than Creative's Media Explorer.)
2. The speed of the hard drives. The PhotoTainer's 20GB hard drive is probably faster than the Zen Micro's 5GB hard drive.
3. The player's operating systems. The PhotoTainer uses Linux and treats MP3 files just as regular files, while the Zen Micro uses a proprietary operating system and does some processing on the MP3 files, such as extracting the artist and album names.
Conclusion
The "USB2" label is no guarantee of transfer speed.
Although the PhotoTainer has 4x the capacity over the Zen Micro, it would take the same amount of time to fill the hard drives of both units.
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