Most efficient way to transfer files/data

Hey guys, I want to transfer probably around 20-30GB of files like pictures and movies etc, to my studio 15 from my old dell dimension 4600 desktop. What would you guys recommend as an efficient, and cost-effective, way to do this?

Like would a 8GB or 16GB USB flash drive be a good choice, particular transfer rate wise??? Thanx a lot for the input

 

Using a router would be the best choice and have both systems plugged into it via ethernet cable.

Any flash drive would work fine as long as its USB 2.0.

 

I second using router or a switch.

 

I routinely move tens of GB from my desktop to my home server through a router. I just bought a gigabit switch this weekend to speed it up. The USB drive would be a better choice though if you aren't going to setup a network.

 

The way I have always done it

 

I'm using the router option too. Can anyone tell if it's normal for a 4Gb file to transfer in 10 minutes? To me it seems a bit slow. My router supports 100 mbit/s transfer speeds. Where is the bottleneck?

 

10 minutes is a bit much. It should be around 5 to 6 minutes.

 

Wireless no

Wired yes it is a bit slow. My guess is that one of the PC's is lagging

 

The most efficient way is a USB Transfer cable. You can find them for $10-$20 on eBay or most electronics stores.

The next most efficient way imo is an external USB drive (or flash drive if you can fit the stuff on it). It also serves as a temporary backup in case things go wrong after you sell/format the old drive.

Personally, I've never been happy using any kind of LAN for large file transfers, but in your case 20GB is not really a lot, so if you already have the network setup it may be the quickest way to go.

 

I think you're right. With one of the PC's the upload speed to Internet never goes above 0.58 Mbit/s (wired), and with the other one I get 1.85 Mbit/s on average (wireless!). Perhaps there's some network card setting that needs to be changed. Sorry for Hi-jacking the thread!

 

Quick question, kind of off topic but I have to ask... How do you configure your router/network to transfer files?

 

Hiya,

For an initial transfer of files I would probably recommend buying an external hard disk drive, which you can copy the files to, and then plug into another system to copy the files from. With this method you get increased reliability as the External Hard Disk will still have the data on it no matter what happens on the device you copy the data to. Also what you can do is plug the external hard drive into one of the machines on your network (if you have one) and share it meaning that all connected devices have access to those files, which is handy for if you have one file on the device which needs updating you can quickly copy the files onto the external drive.

KingRaptor, to share files (transfer files) your router should already be configured, however to set up your computers please follow these guide;

Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/304040

Windows Vista
http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/windows/en-us/help/e20e6875-7210-47bb-bf19-5c60e6ae86151033.mspx



Cheers
Guy

 

You can always enable sharing on one of the machines so that the other machine can browse into it. Then just do a regular copy and paste.