USB Stick Efficiency

Time is money. In business the less time it takes to complete a task, the earlier another can start. Efficiency is a great contributor to profit & a company with a pleasant understanding of it will stand a better chance of prospering. Whilst it is common practice to gauge the efficiency of members of staff, & to put any necessary improvement measures in place, it is also important to know how efficient the IT systems are & in particular how much time is taken up by knowledge transfers.

Businesses using USB sticks as a method of knowledge storage ought to be aware of the read & write speeds that can vary between make & model. Knowing these speeds will give an idea how much time a file transfer will take between a USB stick & PC & vice versa.

Giant files could tie up a computer for a long time & so knowing the likely timescale can help pick the best & most economical time for it to be done. Having an operator twiddling their thumbs at 10am in the morning while waiting for knowledge to transfer is probably not the best use of time, if it could be done in the work of a lunch break.

Calculating the likely time for a file transfer is a simple exercise but a helpful when planning workload. There is only pieces of knowledge needed, of which is the size of the file in query. This can be determined by checking the files 'properties'. The second piece of knowledge necessary is the actual read & write times for the USB stick as indicated by the manufacturer/supplier.

A simple example would be to take a file size of 500MB & a file transfer speed of a typical USB stick of 8MB per second. Dividing 500MB by 8MB per second gives a result of 62.5 seconds or over a minute.

There is of work other aspects that may affect transfer times & they could be slowed down if lots of other processes & programs are walking simultaneously. It is also fair to say that actual transfer times are also dependent on the USB controller within the computer itself.

For the average that merely needs to move a few files around at home, read & write speeds may not be a top priority. For businesses with immense files of knowledge however, knowing how long it could take to transfer them, & planning accordingly, could provide a significant contribution to efficiency.