Transfer files over an Ethernet patch cable

Skip the flash drive. A plain Ethernet cable between two laptops moves files faster than almost anything else you own.

• Plug two computers straight into each other with an ordinary Ethernet cable, give each a manual IP address, and you get a direct link with no router needed.
• Speeds land around nine hundred megabits a second on totally normal hardware, which beats USB drives and cloud uploads by a wide margin.
• Cloud storage is slow and often costly since the file has to travel over the internet twice.
• Wifi and USB drives both promise big numbers but rarely deliver them once you account for real cables, real ports, and real interference.
• The author argues Ethernet is underrated for just moving data between two machines sitting next to each other, no network or file server required.

• Commenters point out this used to require a special crossover cable, but modern network cards detect the wiring automatically and sort it out themselves.
• Several people reminisce about doing this decades ago, wiring up early LAN games or swapping files over serial cables long before broadband existed.
• One thread gets into whether you even need to set IP addresses manually, since most systems will assign themselves working addresses on their own within seconds.
• A commenter mentions Linux just gained similar direct file transfer support over USB-C for compatible devices.
• The sharpest pushback says all this cable fiddling and IP configuring takes longer than just copying the files onto a decent portable SSD.