Cabinate packing/compression?
Stabhappy
31 Oct 2007
A big problem for people with low speed USB devices is the actaul trasfer speed, primarily when harnessing lots of small files - a cabinate feature (basically zipping all the modules/updates) would fix this.
Pedro
06 Nov 2007
The exe files are already compressed so it wouldn't improve much the size or the speed.
In fact it is better to have small files because USB works in bursts. It will loose speed for long transfers (as oposed to Firewire).
For old desktop PCs I would recommend adding a USB 2.0 PCI card (less than 15 euros). For old portables a PCMCIA (or PC-Card) USB 2.0 card may be too expensive (around 40 euros) so the cheapest option is to burn the autopatcher folder to a CD-RW (around 50c) which should be 4 times faster than USB 1.1 (a 40x CD drive transfers data at 6MB/s while a USB 1.1 transfers at 1.5Mb/s)
In fact it is better to have small files because USB works in bursts. It will loose speed for long transfers (as oposed to Firewire).
For old desktop PCs I would recommend adding a USB 2.0 PCI card (less than 15 euros). For old portables a PCMCIA (or PC-Card) USB 2.0 card may be too expensive (around 40 euros) so the cheapest option is to burn the autopatcher folder to a CD-RW (around 50c) which should be 4 times faster than USB 1.1 (a 40x CD drive transfers data at 6MB/s while a USB 1.1 transfers at 1.5Mb/s)
Cyrus
08 Nov 2007
A PCMCIA to USB 2.0 card is only 10-12 USD online, so it's not expensive at all. Also, you could use WinRAR to create an archive of the files if you really wanted to. (WinRAR is free online, just search for it.)
Pedro
08 Nov 2007
If you want to create archives use 7zip. It's open source and supports all popular archives (zip, rar, etc) and the fantastic 7z archives.
Stabhappy
11 Nov 2007
Well maybe it's only a problem with very small files then - I've always harnessed large time gains when archiving files before a transfer.
