You seem to have confirmed that larger files transfer faster...
Even when they are not copied from an ODD.
Yep, according to the benchmarks that I did on both the Hard Drive and the installation media (the usb drive) there are two things that can slow down the driverpack installation:
1.) the compression ratio of the driverpacks archives
2.) the write speed of the Hard Drive
The compression ratio was the first thing that was slowing down the installation process. whenever I tried extracting one of the driverpacks, the CPU usage in task manager would hit 99-100%, so I tried getting rid of the compression and it ended up speeding things up a bit. However, when I did that, the Hard Drive became the new bottle neck of the installation. I knew that it wasn't the read speed of the usb drive since the USB could read at decent data rates no matter how small the size of the individual files were. When I looked at the write speed of the hard drive for files that were 4 KB in size, it was clear that the hard drive's write speed for small files was the bottle neck (the USB read at 4.892 MB/s but the hard drive only wrote at 0.839 MB/s). Hard drives are much better at writing big files than tiny files, which explains why the .7z archive with the cab compressed drivers transferred faster than the .7z archive that had all of the drivers extracted. At this point, the only way to make the installation go faster would be installing windows on a hard drive (or flash drive) with a faster write speed.
I don't think it is a good idea to start combining all of our packs into one single huge pack wink
But. It is nice to know that if we do then we can shave about 25% off our extraction time.
I don't think you have to combine all of the driverpacks into one huge pack to save space. I believe that it was the cab compressed drivers and the fact that the .7z archive had no compression that speed up the installation. So if you wanted to keep all of the driverpacks in their own archives, you should be able to, you just may have to create each driverpack using the Stand Alone Driver option with method 1 for each driverpack, making sure not to add the cabbed driverpacks to the same directory. Then just compress each directory that the driverpacks are in using 7zip with storage compression, and name the archive anything with "DP" in the beginning of the name. Just make sure that whatever you name it is no longer than 8 characters long (8.3 file name limit in DOS). I'll have to try it though. When I do complete the test, I'll edit my previous post to add the test.
)? Also, I would like to keep all of the driverpacks on the installed drive, so whenever I insert a device (via usb or wherever), windows automatically installs it (kind of like how most linux distributions do when you plug in a usb wifi adapter or a printer, they get installed and configured automatically). I know that I need to make A SAD folder on my hard drive, but would I also have to use devpath so that windows knows where to look for additional drivers?