🚀 USB Transfer Time Calculator
Real-world transfer time estimates with bottleneck detection
Estimated Transfer Time:
Actual speeds depend on:
- 🔹 USB Drive/Cable quality and length
- 🔹 File system (NTFS/exFAT/FAT32)
- 🔹 Number/size/type of files
- 🔹 Background system activity
Note: The read and write speed of any USB drive will depend on the source and destination file. For example, a USB 3.2 drive will offer different read/write performance on an NVMe compared to a hard drive. So, it is important to consider the read write speed of where you are reading or writing data from and to.
You can use this tool as a USB drive to Computer file transfer time calculator or vice versa. I have added sections for adding custom speed for both source and destination drives. Transfer efficiency mainly depends on your computer's overall performance. If you have a high-end PC, you can increase it; otherwise, it is good to keep it low.
Note: We haven't considered the type of data we are going to move or copy from the computer to the USB drive or vice versa. Sequential data generally has a faster transfer speed than random data. You can read about that here. We are talking about the raw speeds, which are essential for the sequential data like large video files, photos, documents, etc.
How does this tool work?
It will be a little complex to explain the steps on how the calculator works. It would take a lot of words. However, I can try to explain through an example.
Copying a 50GB movie from an NVMe SSD to USB 3.0:
- Source (NVMe): 3500 MB/s read
- USB 3.0: 625 MB/s write
- Bottleneck: 625 MB/s
- With 85% efficiency: 625 × 0.85 = 531.25 MB/s (This accounts for ≈15% losses from encoding, fragmentation, etc)
- 50GB = 51,200 MB
51,200 ÷ 531.25 ≈ 96 seconds → 01:36 (total time estimated)
This tool gives you an approximate value that is almost near to the real world. Try it out to understand how much time will a file take to copy or move from a computer to USB drive or vice-versa.