Questions about my new harddrive

I've got a few questions about my new HDD, a Samsung S2 portable 320gb 2.5 usb

1. It says 480Mbit a second of transfer rate - although when I try to copy something it's like 10MB/sec
2. Does 2 hard drives increase performance? (Samsung is external and my other one is Internal)

Thanks!

The HDD can handle 480Mbit/sec transfer but it also depends on how fast your computer can transfer the files.

theski232 said:

The HDD can handle 480Mbit/sec transfer but it also depends on how fast your computer can transfer the files.

What do you exactly mean with that?

480MBit/sec is the theoretical top speed of the USB 2.0 protocol. Note it's MBit, not MB (megabytes) - with practical overhead and other factors, the most you can really get out of USB 2.0 is about 40-50MB/sec.

Other factors affecting file copy speed over USB...the two harddisks involved, their degree of fragmentation, rotational speed, random access time, size of the files to be copied, filesystems in use, CPU load during the copy process, whether write caching is enabled or disabled for the internal and USB drives, and so on and so on. Even the quality of the actual USB-to-SATA adapter built into the external drive case affects the speed.

However, if you consistently get no more than 10MB/sec there's a rather serious bottleneck somewhere as you should get at least double that speed.

Corazon said:

480MBit/sec is the theoretical top speed of the USB 2.0 protocol. Note it's MBit, not MB (megabytes) - with practical overhead and other factors, the most you can really get out of USB 2.0 is about 40-50MB/sec.

Other factors affecting file copy speed over USB...the two harddisks involved, their degree of fragmentation, rotational speed, random access time, size of the files to be copied, filesystems in use, CPU load during the copy process, whether write caching is enabled or disabled for the internal and USB drives, and so on and so on. Even the quality of the actual USB-to-SATA adapter built into the external drive case affects the speed.

However, if you consistently get no more than 10MB/sec there's a rather serious bottleneck somewhere as you should get at least double that speed.

Tried to transfer Program Files (x86) from my old hdd to my new hdd - transfer rate is 6mb/sec? This is probably not good, how do I fix this?

The Program Files (x86) folder is kind of an odd folder to transfer. Are you trying to make a back up copy of your installed programs onto the new external hard drive?

ignatzatsonic said:

The Program Files (x86) folder is kind of an odd folder to transfer. Are you trying to make a back up copy of your installed programs onto the new external hard drive?

No I'm testing the transfer rate of the hard drive.

pparks1 said:

The best way to test your speed is to try copying a single large file. Do you have anything like a 1GB or 2GB ISO file you could copy. Copy that, time it with a stopwatch and then do the actual math. If you get around 30MB/sec...things are just fine and that's about what you will get with USB 2.0.

I get 26MB/sec, that's okay? Also to increase boot and loading of games for exmaple do I need to have all files running on the Samsung HDD?