Automator action - Copying Files to multiple USB Memory sticks?

JeffCGD

Registered
I am trying to construct an automator action to efficiently copy a 15Mb folder containing 9 items to 7 512Mb USB memory sticks connected to a powered 7-port USB2 hub. I have 950 of these memory sticks to do this to (yes, it's for work).

Copying the files to a single USB memory stick takes about 20 seconds. Copying the files with an automator action is taking more than 10 minutes!
This is with an action that does:

Get Specified Finder Items (the 15Mb folder of files) --> Copy Finder Items (to GENERIC usb volume 1) --> Copy Finder Items (to GENERIC usb volume 2) --> Copy Finder Items (to GENERIC usb volume 3) --> Copy Finder Items (to GENERIC usb volume 4) --> Copy Finder Items (to GENERIC usb volume 5) --> Copy Finder Items (to GENERIC usb volume 6) --> Copy Finder Items (to GENERIC usb volume 7).
This took about 10 minutes.

I even tried putting the Get Specified Finder Items before each Copy Finder Items. This took 24 minutes!

Can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong, and what I can do do do it correctly?
Thanks in advance.
 
Wow, that sounds like quite an unusual project. It also sounds like Automator is waiting for the first copy to finish before it starts on the second. Perhaps, if its possible to run a number of automator actions concurrently, you could create 7 nearly identical automator actions. Action #1 would be "Get files" -> Copy to USB key #1 -> Eject USB key #1. You could then cascade them, running them 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 and then swap the keys and run 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 again. Still fiddly though.

The other option is to open Terminal and have a look at how the memory keys are labelled in the /Volumes folder, and then whip up a shell script to use the cp command to copy the files across to them. In theory, it should be faster.
 
We've discovered that manually copying the folder containing the files to each of the mounted USB Memory sticks on the desktop results in concurrent copies as you would expect, taking about 1 minute 30 seconds (including some overhead for USB bandwidth). So obviously something is going wrong with the automator action if it's taking between 10 and 24 minutes! No idea what though.
 
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