Transfer Rate Between 2 Sata6 HDDs on Motherboard

slade8200 · 09 Feb 2017

I have an older Asus board (5 yrs), and it has 2 sata6 ports on it. I have 2 drives hooked up to them, 1 is a 1tb Crucial MX300 and the other is a 4tb Hitachi HUS7240. Both drives say Sata 6Gpbs on them. When moving huge files (1-2gb) from 1 to the other, in this case to the Hitachi, I only average 15MB/s.

Seems awfully slow. The only thing I can think that might be choking this down is the cable I'm using. 1 says Sata6 but the other doesn't.

Thanks.

Megahertz07 · 09 Feb 2017

One thing is the link speed, the other is the write and read speed on the device.
Crucial MX300 is a Solid State Drive (SSD) and it works as a memory. Has no moving parts.
Hitachi HUS7240 is a Hard Disk Drive. To write and read the data it has to move a sensor on the surface of a rotating disk.

Normally a SSD is 6 times faster than a HDD.

Mellon Head · 10 Feb 2017

It also depends on the file size when batch copying. Smaller files will lower the transfer speed ( know that sounds counter-intuitive), and large files will see an increase in transfer speed. I think it has to do with how many entries the smaller files have to write into the FAT. The head on the HDD will have to travel more than a sequential write with a large file.

That's my guess, anyway. I have confirmed the large file/small file speed thing with SuperCopier.

slade8200 · 10 Feb 2017

So in conclusion my speeds are OK?

Megahertz07 · 10 Feb 2017

Average 15MB/s for one big file is slow but normal for multi files.

Schrade · 14 Feb 2017

One way to increase transfer speed is (in the future), creating partitions with larger than 'default' Allocation Unit Size.

In theory, this could lead to increased number of data errors. In practice, using second highest unit size - 32k (64k is highest), I've never had a problem with standard definition video files...