usb 3.0 EXTREMELY slow transfer rates

quanzaboy · 05 Jan 2011

Dear Forum Users,

I have just purchased an external WD 500GB usb 3.0 hard drive.

My motherboard does not natively support usb 3.0 so in addition I also bought a usb 3.0 controller which I connected to one of those mini PCI slots on my motherboard which gave me 2 usb 3.0 ports.

(My MB model: GIGABYTE - Motherboard - Socket 1156 - GA-P55-UD5 (rev. 1.0))

After hooking up the drive to the usb 3.0 slot I wanted to test the transfer rates by copying a 12GB folder to my new usb 3.0 external hard drive.

I was shocked at how SLOW the transfer rate actually was! On average it was only about 15-20 MB/sec which is pitiful.

Now of course I realize that the maximum transfer speed is determined by the weakest link (i.e. the slowest hard drive), but this is what I don't understand either, since both my internal drives are SATA II 3Gb/s drives (WD Caviar Blue 500GB and WD Caviar Green 1TB), so that should at the very LEAST give me about 100-150MB/s transfer rates, so how come it's SO SLOW as to give me only 15MB/s average??!

After doing the above tests I decided just for the sake of it to try and copy 2 700MB AVI files from one internal drive to the other (source drive is the WD Caviar Green 1TB and destination drive is the WD Caviar Blue 500GB). The results were equally as SHOCKING! Shockingly SLOW that is... It gave me a burst in the first few seconds of about 168MB/s, but then it settled down on about 20MB/s throughout the rest of the file transfer!

Again, this is with both drives being SATA II 3.0Gb/s drives. I think I may have stumbled upon a much bigger problem! Why are my internal drives SO SLOW???

Anyone have any ideas as to why this is happening?

Thank you very much!!!

quanzaboy

Hopalong X · 05 Jan 2011

The pci slot itself is probably the bottleneck.
Check the Gigabyte web site and see what the transfer speeds are on the PCI slots for your mother board.
Specifically the one you are using for the PCI card.
Different PCI slots have different speeds. PCI, PCI-1.0, PCI-2.0 etc.

Mike

Golden · 05 Jan 2011

Hi Quanzaboy,

Can we just check a few things please?

Can you perform the following drive speed benchmark for each drive:

1. Open an elevated command prompt
- click Start Orb then type cmd in the search box
- right click on cmd and select Run as administrator
2. In the Command prompt window, type winsat disk -drive <drive letter>
- to test E: just type winsat disk -drive e
- to test C: just type winsat drive (you do not need to type C here)
3. Post the results here

Regards,
Golden

EDIT : Just saw Mike's post. I agree the slot is probably the bottleneck.

whs · 05 Jan 2011

When you copy between the 2 internal HDDs, you have to realize that the bus is shared and the system has to multiplex between the 2 drives. That could explain the performance for that test. For the PCI/USB3 I have no explanation. Maybe Mike's suggestion gets you somewhere.

PS; the test that Golden suggests gives you the raw speed of the drive, but not the effect of the interference on the bus.

Mike Connor · 05 Jan 2011

Sounds like you don't have the right hard disc drivers installed for your motherboard.

Had the same problem on my board after some hardware upgrades.

By the way, eSATA is a lot faster than USB3.0 ( which is still very buggy with the NEC chips).

Here is a comparison, all using the same disc but on various ports and using various drivers;

Using USB 2.0

Using USB 3.0

( Doesn't work properly, drops into legacy mode, problem with hardware ).

Using eSATA

Even a working USB 3.0 interface is not as fast as eSATA. So a bit pointless really. I decided not to bother with any USB 3.0 hardware for myself after quite a lot of testing.

Regards....Mike Connor

EDIT : PS. you can get the HDTune utility here for free; http://www.hdtune.com/download.html

You need to set up the BIOS correctly, and if you use extra hardware you need to use the right slot/port for it.

Check the storage interface ports for your board;

http://www.gigabyte.com/products/pro...px?pid=3159#sp

and the drivers;

http://www.gigabyte.com/products/pro...px?pid=3159#dl

Mike Connor · 05 Jan 2011

Just for info, here is the test on an internal drive;

These are not very fast drives. If you try to time transfers between the internal drives you will get skewed results because they use the same bus.

Regards....Mike Connor

thehappyman · 05 Jan 2011

Hi Quanzaboy
For whatever its worth I tried using HDTUNE to test my USB 3.0 Drives speed but the program aborts and gives me a "Read Error". Probably because its a 3 TB Drive. So I used the ATTO Benchmark instead which didnt have the same problem.

Just for a comparison here are benchies of 4 of my drives -

1) A WD Caviar Black 2 TB Sata 3GB/sec @ 7200 rpm (with 64 MB cache)
2) A WD MyBook 3 TB USB 3.0 PCI controller driven External Drive
3) A WD Velociraptor 600 GB Sata 3GB/sec @ 10,000 rpm
4) An OCZ Vertex 2 240 GB SSD (Sata 3 GB/sec)

Curiously enough the ATTO benchmark shows all 3 of the mechanical disks to have roughly the same performance. The fastest one by far is the OCZ SSD. I think your Caviar Green and Blue may both be 5400 rpm drives ??? but your scores still seem too low - try the free ATTO benchmarker - good luck :):):)

usb 3.0 EXTREMELY slow transfer rates-diskscompare.jpg

pparks1 · 05 Jan 2011

quanzaboy said:

Now of course I realize that the maximum transfer speed is determined by the weakest link (i.e. the slowest hard drive), but this is what I don't understand either, since both my internal drives are SATA II 3Gb/s drives (WD Caviar Blue 500GB and WD Caviar Green 1TB), so that should at the very LEAST give me about 100-150MB/s transfer rates, so how come it's SO SLOW as to give me only 15MB/s average??!

A caviar Blue or Green would likely test in the max sequential realm of about 85-90MB/sec.

quanzaboy said:

After doing the above tests I decided just for the sake of it to try and copy 2 700MB AVI files from one internal drive to the other (source drive is the WD Caviar Green 1TB and destination drive is the WD Caviar Blue 500GB). The results were equally as SHOCKING! Shockingly SLOW that is... It gave me a burst in the first few seconds of about 168MB/s, but then it settled down on about 20MB/s throughout the rest of the file transfer!

Yeah, this should be much faster than this. I would expect 60-80MB/sec between the 2 physical drives.

I would check to ensure that WRITE CACHING is enabled on the Caviar Blue.

whs · 05 Jan 2011

thehappyman said:

Hi Quanzaboy
For whatever its worth I tried using HDTUNE to test my USB 3.0 Drives speed but the program aborts and gives me a "Read Error". Probably because its a 3 TB Drive. So I used the ATTO Benchmark instead which didnt have the same problem.

Just for a comparison here are benchies of 4 of my drives -

1) A WD Caviar Black 2 TB Sata 3GB/sec @ 7200 rpm (with 64 MB cache)
2) A WD MyBook 3 TB USB 3.0 PCI controller driven External Drive
3) A WD Velociraptor 600 GB Sata 3GB/sec @ 10,000 rpm
4) An OCZ Vertex 2 240 GB SSD (Sata 3 GB/sec)

Curiously enough the ATTO benchmark shows all 3 of the mechanical disks to have roughly the same performance. The fastest one by far is the OCZ SSD. I think your Caviar Green and Blue may both be 5400 rpm drives ??? but your scores still seem too low - try the free ATTO benchmarker - good luck :):):)

The one that is really disappointing is the Raptor. I was about to buy one to put into my USB3 enclosure. But after seeing your data, I think I can save my money and go for a less expensive solution.

dazco · 05 Jan 2011

By the way, eSATA is a lot faster than USB3.0 ( which is still very buggy with the NEC chips).

I have a 3.0 USB mobo. I don't have any 3.0 devices and i didn't buy the mobo for that. and of course i knew 3.0 would be backwards compatible with USB 2.0 devices, but i never thought about the possibility it might be buggy. Question is, in games my mouse does something it never did before which is a buggy sort of issue. Could this be due to having USB 3.0 on the mobo?