Slow scanning to USB when large numbers of files on USB drive Kyocera 4501i

[giddyupngo]

Hello,
A customer scans lots of documents to a USB drive, and puts it on the setting where each page becomes its own file. Here are the results.
Scanned 32 pages double sided to a clean drive, after paper goes through, takes 12 seconds to store.
Same 32 pages again on same drive, 2 minutes, 2 seconds to store.
Same 32 pages again on same drive, 3 minutes, 40 seconds to store.

As the number of files on the drive increases (after second run it had 128 files on it), the storing takes much longer. They have said it can take up to 15 minutes. I am using a 4GB drive, non partitioned. Has anyone run into this? Wondering if it would go quicker if each set of files went into a separate folder on the drive. If I delete the files on the drive from the Operation panel, it will do it in 12 seconds again.
Thanks in advance.

[Kyo fan]

You could try with different drive and measure the results, but in general, it's not the optimal way for every day scanning of multiple sheets. Why don't you tell him that there are better, safer and faster ways of doing it through SMB/e-mail/FTP?

[giddyupngo]

Thanks Kyo Fan, however they want to scan this way. I did find a workaround. If you create separate folders on the USB drive, and scan each batch of files into a fresh folder, you always get the "clean drive" speeds. I scanned a 48 page document, split into 48 different Tiff files, and it took about 20 seconds to process after the pages went through. As long as I used a fresh folder for each batch, the speed stayed at 20 seconds. The MFP must slow down because it is referencing/indexing so many files.