win 7 usb speed?

[cmendla]

I was copying a lot of data from an external hard drive to a new win 7 machine. it was a low end HP with 3 gig of ram.

what surprised me was that it seemed surprisingly fast. what i thought would take a couple of hours took about a half hour.

any opinions as to the speed increase being from the hardware or is the os a little more efficientg...or is it my imagination?

[coopster]

It may be hardware, software, or even the OS. One thing I can tell you for certain on Win machines is that I have found that archived files (.zip and friends) transfer much, much quicker than uncompressed directories and directory structures.

[bill]

You didn't mention which level of the USB spec your drive was using. It's possible that the Windows 7 drivers developed for that external drive utilize that protocol more efficiently and allow faster data transfer. I've read that most USB connections only use about 2/3rds of the potential transfer rate.

[cmendla]

The machine was 64 bit so that may make a difference.

At any rate, I'm thinking that I may want to move up from my vista 32 bit laptop at some point in the future as soon as finances allow.