

This does not match my experiences. Transferring files over USB would absolutely be faster than sending a zip and unzipping it on a flash drive. I can easily do 300MB/s over USB3.2 when transferring music files.
Unzipping a large file is going to be a bunch of reads and write and the large file is going to transfer at the exact same speed as the smaller music files, which are not “small”, they’re still tens of MB. So, the zip and music files take roughly the same time except now you have to wait to unzip with one large file. It does not save time.
Transferring tens of thousands of 1kb files will slow things down, and I’d zip this, but music files are big enough.





Understood. I’m also talking about sending a full zip over to the flash drive, then unzipping it on that same flash drive.
Music files are large enough to not get affected by overhead like sending a ton of 1kb files. I see no significant difference in transfer time sending 100 10mb files or a single 1000mb file.
This is a totally different story with actually small files (ie kilobytes). Music downloads are not small, they’re multiple megabytes.