Windows 7: It's like watching someone move a pile of sand 1 grain at a time.

I am in the process of moving 1.8TB of data from 1 USB drive to another USB drive and it is quite slow, averaging almost 30MB/sec.
I am 16 hours in and there are maybe 4-5 hours left.
Old drive is USB2 and new one is USB3 so future transfers from and to the new USB3 drive to any drive other than USB2 will be much faster.

I think I'd of removed the drives from there enclosures and plugged them directly to the PC SATA ports before attempting to move that ammount of data.

They are WD My Book Essentials and 1 is brand new and the other is 8 months or so old. They are a pain to remove from the case and I don't want to void the warranty, otherwise I would have just moved the hard disks between the enclosures and not have to copy anything.

At least that is what you hope for. I've seen many USB3 threads where people are disappointed that their transfers aren't much better than they were before. I've been using eSATA for a while now and I've been very happy with that. About 80-90MB/sec is what I get with my dock.

Yes I have seen some mention of that also.

Interesting I heard from Paragon there may be an issue with windows 7 and the newer usb 3.0 drivers - apparently fine recognising the drives - but speeds aren't what they might be.

I don't know anything more about it than that vague suggestion, and I don't have any usb 3.0 devices myself.

Sounds plausible, though.

I hear Macrium are also having problems with transfer speeds - particularly with WD usb 3 externals - not sure why that is - I think they might all be using the same Renesas drivers.

I have a USB3 device that I can plug naked drives into by sitting them in it like bread in a toaster,(2,5 and 3,5 disks) it is very handy as I can use old drives that I no longer want in my PC.
Speeds.......It starts off like a rocket with speeds up from 200 MB/sec but soon slows down to what I would call normal SATA speeds similar to your posted 80-90 MB/sec.
Not what is advertised but still a huge improvement over USB2

I've used USB3 drives in the past on my machine and I've seen over double the write speed of the USB2 drives I have.
I get around 70MB/sec when I copy to this new USB3 drive.

I have a Thermaltake BlacX enclosure at home and at work that is USB 2 and eSATA.

Unless you are plugging in SSD drives into your enclosures, the 200MB/sec is bogus as standard mechanical hard drives cannot read and supply data that fast, or write data that fast.

What do you feel is advertised and how fast would you expect it to go? The spec allows for up to 5.0Gbps and it's often said that is 10x faster than 480Mbps which is USB 2.0 spec. This would be about 60MB/sec if there was no overhead and 100% efficiency. So, if you expect USB 3 speeds in the 600MB/sec, then you will be terribly disappointed.

I mean, if your source hard drive in your computer can only do 60MB/sec...then you would be limited to 60MB/sec or slower to your USB device. Unless you are using SSD's in your USB 3 enclosure and as source drives, you are likely going to be physically unable to surpass 100MB/sec.

Mine is called Icy box HDD docking station

I am quoting speeds shown by windows 7 as to how accurate these speeds are pass I do not know


The back up HDD is a 2.5 laptop drive








Advertised here is up to 10x faster and yes I would like to see speeds that are faster than 60MB/sec but like I said still an improvement over USB2

you are more than welcome to look at my specs. I don't have a spare ssd for the docking station yet but then as I explained it is for old drives I no longer use in my PC

I didn't have a lot of time yesterday so I slapped the post up without an explanation for the attachments.
The backup drive I was using was a laptop drive and I chose this as my 3.5 drives are all encrypted which I believe would most probably affect the read and write speeds.

My original statement was that using USB 3, transfer speeds started off very fast and slowed down as the copy proceeded. I came to this info as I originally copied large amounts of data (approx 400GB) to my backup drives. What I didn't try to do was copy smaller amounts. When I made this post I just moved individual folders (as you can see)with just a few Gigabytes and I was amazed at the speeds that were achieved, it went so fast that I hardly had chance to go in menu to open the snipping tool. lol Also these speeds were fairly constant.

PParks I cant argue with you about what is possible speed-wise as I do not know but I do know that these speeds even if not shown correctly by windows were still very very fast!!

One thing that is confusing me is why writing to an Intel RAID with HDD's was so much faster than to the Intel RAID with SSD's I have now repeated this copy more times but it does not make a difference.