How to tell if you're a masochist

[perrinoia]

I wanted to copy my archive of Tribes related downloads from my old laptop hard drive to my new Microsoft Surface...
Step 1) I plugged the old hard drive into a SATA to USB adapter (which has two USB plugs)
Step 2) I plugged the USB adapter into my ASUS PC (because it has more than one USB outlet)
Step 3) I configured the folder containing all of my Tribes related downloads as a shared network drive.
Step 4) I opened the folder on the Surface and copied its 10+GB contents onto my Surface's 256GB microSDXC card.

The SATA drive has read/write speeds of up to 3GB/s...
The USB adapter is probably slower that that, but I'm not sure...
The wireless network is unreliable, but should be gigabit speeds.
But the microSDXCcard has read/write speeds of 80Mbps.

This file transfer is going to take all night...

I could have copied to the Surface's SSD...
I could have plugged the SATA to USB adapter directly into the Surface (the second USB plug is just for power, so I could have plugged it into the Surface's power brick, which has a USB port that is strictly for charging things).
I could cancel the transfer now, and do it the other way, faster...

But, nope... I'm a glutton for punishment...

[perrinoia]

Ugh, I just woke up to an error message claiming the destination does not exist... My $70 256GB micro SDXC card is showing it's value.

I just plugged the SATA to USB adapter directly into the Surface (and its power brick), and tried again... Same error message. The problem is definitely the micro SDXC card, so I guess I gotta copy the folder to the SSD now.

I was really hoping to avoid wasting valuable space on the small non-removable SSD, and I was also hoping the micro SDXC card would triple the Surface's storage capacity, but it would appear that it doesn't want to accept large file transfers, which makes it useless to me.

[DaRk]

How do you not have spare hard drives around with a HDD dock?

[Groove]

prolly the wifi is the bottleneck, wifi sucks

drive is probably around 100 megs/sec (- or + depending on how old it is), usb 2.0 adapter would limit that to max of about 25 megs/sec, then if the microSD is really 80megabit then that's about 8 megs/sec

but since ur seeing lower than any of those its most likely wifi

[perrinoia]

The SATA adapter is better than an enclosure, because I can swap out drives quickly.
I own 2 IDE external enclosures, but one is dead and the other is lost, but this is a SATA drive...
I also own a few external drives, but I wanted to store this data in my Surface without carrying around an external device, or taking up my internal drive space...

PS: The 256GB MicroSDXC card is a fake. It only stores 2GB. I got ripped off.

[virus]

Remember, FAT32 doesn't support 3GB files. Must be formatted to NTFS

[perrinoia]

I was not aware of that, however, I don't believe there are any 3GB+ files in the folder I'm trying to copy.

The folder contains everything Tribes related I've ever downloaded (with my old MSI laptop). There are zip and rar archives, and each of them has been extracted into subdirectories, as well. The total of all the file sizes is 10.3GB, however, the total of all the archive file sizes is approximately 1.75GB.

Then again, for there to be such a drastic difference in size of archive versus uncompressed data, there must be files that are massive, but easily compressed, such as large, repetitive, console log files.