Saving a large plan file to a USB flash drive


Rich_Winsor
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If you have made the mistake of trying to use Chief

to save a large plan file to a USB flash drive you

already know what a time consuming process that

can be. I don't know what the data transfer rate is

for doing a "save as" from Chief's File drop down

menu, but it is way slower than the transfer rate

for using Windows Explorer to make the transfer.

 

By way of a test I tried saving a 71.9MB plan file to

my USB flash drive using Chief's save as function.

The little teal whirligig sat there and spun for an 

agonizing 4 minutes and 50 seconds before the save

was completed. By way of comparison transferring

the same file from my desktop to the USB drive

using Windows Explorer took only 29 seconds.

 

So bottom line, it will save you a lot of time to save

your file from Chief to some convenient location on

your hard drive and then transfer the file to your

USB flash drive using Windows Explorer.

 

But then you probably already knew that.  :)

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Under normal circumstances, Chief should recognize that the USB device is ejectable and then do a save to a temporary location and a copy to the USB device. This should then approach the speed of copying using Windows Explorer. Some USB devices are horribly slow when doing random access IO, which we rely on to write recovery markers into our files so that minor file corruption doesn't always result in total loss of your data.

 

This won't work if your temporary files folder is also located on an ejectable device.

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If you have made the mistake of trying to use Chief

to save a large plan file to a USB flash drive you

already know what a time consuming process that

can be. I don't know what the data transfer rate is

for doing a "save as" from Chief's File drop down

menu, but it is way slower than the transfer rate

for using Windows Explorer to make the transfer.

 

By way of a test I tried saving a 71.9MB plan file to

my USB flash drive using Chief's save as function.

The little teal whirligig sat there and spun for an 

agonizing 4 minutes and 50 seconds before the save

was completed. By way of comparison transferring

the same file from my desktop to the USB drive

using Windows Explorer took only 29 seconds.

 

So bottom line, it will save you a lot of time to save

your file from Chief to some convenient location on

your hard drive and then transfer the file to your

USB flash drive using Windows Explorer.

 

But then you probably already knew that.  :)

 Appreciate the heads up Rich.  I personally don't seem to have that problem though.  I'm wondering if perhaps its specific to certain devices or systems.  Doing a save as and using Windows Explorer seem to result in a nearly identical speed of data transfer for me. 

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Well shut my mouth wide open (whatever that means).

Upon further review it appears as though the transfer

speed for USB flash drives is indeed very much device

dependent. While all my flash drives are USB 3.0 and

they are all being plugged into an Intel USB 3.0 Root

Hub there is quite a difference in performance from

drive to drive. The drive that performed so poorly is an

older one that has been beating around in my pocket

so long that there are no identifiable markings on it any

more. Windows says it is a Cruzer 8GB drive. I also

tried the "save as" on an 8GB Transcend drive that took

about 20 seconds and finally I did a "save as" to a

spiffy SanDisk 64GB Extreme flash drive that lived up 

to its name by being almost instantaneous in completing

the save (no more than 2 or 3 seconds).

 

So I guess I should amend the tip to say that if you

have a dog slow USB drive you can save yourself

some time by using the Windows Explorer option.

 

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  • 2 months later...

I have stopped using virtually all external devices for file transfer.

 

Nearly anything I need to transfer, regardless of size, I use TeamViewer that has an awesome file transfer feature, among many others. I regularly move items between my computers within my LAN, and over the WAN to other computers. Very easy, very fast. Particularly within your LAN, most of us are on Gb speeds, so you can move a lot, fast.

 

Not just files, you can move a folder or as many folders as you want, all at once.

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