It really could be 7 hours - I spent way too long investigating how to copy to USB quickly, and discovered it's a combination of: * Variability in flash driv

It really could be 7 hours - I spent way too long investigating how to copy to USB quickly, and discovered it's a combination of: * Variability in flash drive speeds. * Variability of USB implementations. For instance, a 2008 MacBook is less than half as fast as a 2010 MacBook Pro, and both were slower than Linux running on a Dell. * Most USB drives use awful filesystems like FAT16 and FAT32 that are inefficient when it comes to any complexity, as far as both space needed and speed. That said, I was working with millions of files, and eventually a coworker developed a single-file storage. But for people with that horrible task, the trick is mainly to make a USB drive image with the filesystem intact, and flash the drives blindly.