Quote:
Originally Posted by Purple Lady
Is it my imagination or is usb a lot quicker? I keep about 800 books on my tablet.
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USB transfers data much faster than wifi, usually around 8 times faster. If your wifi is congested (neighbors, distance, etc.) or stuck at an older max speed (11 mbit) than USB can win even more. If you are using USB 1 (I would be very surprised if you were) then WiFi wins.
In addition to base wire speeds, when calibre transfers files by USB, that is all that it does. It does not maintain a database on the device. CC does maintain a DB, and writing that DB is much slower than the network. CC can write up to 7 or 8 books per second on my galaxy nexus, but that drops to 1 to 3 once the DB grows.
Finally, I expect that the total time required to use USB to transfer the books then have CC scan and detect them is longer than it would have been simply to transfer them with CC. First you must transfer the books. Next, start CC and let it scan. The scan process must open every book to get the metadata, write this intermediate metadata to the DB, send that metadata to calibre, receive back the correct metadata, then write that to the DB. This is much more work than when you send a book; that requires one write to the DB, writing the book file, and no opening of the book file. The network time to transfer and write a book is overlaid with the time to write the DB, so in many cases the network time becomes negligible.