My USB 3.0 is slow

[scout9]

Hi,

I just bought a WD Passport external hard drive with USB 3.0, but when I tried it, I only got writing speeds of about 30-39 MB/s, which is the same speed as my USB 2.0.
I bought this USB 3.0 hard drive thinking that it would increase the writing speed greatly, but it does not seem to be working. Is there some sort of trick or activation that I need to do in order to reach these high writing speeds?

Thanks

P.S. I have SSD installed, so this should give out decent writing speeds isnt it? even with the USB 2.0 30 MB/s is pretty slow i think

 

[pparks1]

30MB/sec with USB 2.0 is pretty much about what it can do. The theoretical max is 60MB/sec...but I've never seen a USB 2.0 device hit that max. About 60% of max is the max with USB overhead.

The 2.5" hard drive in the enclosure is likely going to max out around 70MB/sec itself. So, you shouldn't expect anything faster than that.

I would expect you to hit around 60MB/sec over a USB 3.0 interface with this drive. If you copy a single large file, do you get close to 60MB/sec? Lots of little files will kill the transfer speed. So be sure that you test with a large file to see what the drive is capable of.

 

[scout9]

Copying one large file actually did make a difference, the speed increased but it was fluctuating between 60 MB/s and 90 MB/s, so I could not get a steady overall speed.
That's inconvenient though to have the speed decrease when copying lots of files as oppose to copying one large file

 

[pparks1]

So, it seems like your USB 3.0 drive is working just where it should with that single large file copy. It will vary based on things like fragementation, etc. Not to mention, Windows will show cached speeds, etc. To get your overall speed, time it with a stopwatch. If you copy 785MB in 12.6 seconds, that's an average of about 62.3MB/sec. Around 60MB/sec is generally what I would tell people to expect with USB 3.0...and I usually tell them about 25MB/sec for USB 2.0.

It's always far less efficient to copy lots of files individually versus 1 large file. That's why people usually zip everything up into a single file and then copy the zip file.