usb 3.0 EXTREMELY slow transfer rates

[quanzaboy]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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/product-page.aspx?pid=3159#sp

and the drivers;



http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=3159#dl

 

[Mike Connor]

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]

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

 

[pparks1]

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.

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]

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
View attachment 129361

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]

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?

 

[thehappyman]

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
View attachment 129361

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.

Hi WHS - The only thing I can think of to explain the Velociraptors less than stellar Performance is that it only has a 16 MB Cache

 

[whs]

That could explain it of course. Still, it is not earthshaking. Thanks for the additional info.

 

[MilesAhead]

Hmmmm something must be weird because I keep seeing these low copy rates for USB 3.0 drives. I have SIIG USB 3.0 cards in my PCs with SIIG and Sharkoon USB 3.0 docking stations. I use WD Caviar Black 3 Gb/sec and 6 Gb/sec drives in the docks. Sequential read of multi GB files from the 6 Gb/sec drives are typically 120 MB/sec or faster. From the 3 Gb/sec drives it's over 100. Granted Windows Explorer give an optimistic number but Crystal Disk Mark shows sequential reads of over 130 MB/sec for the 6 Gb drives and over 100 MB/sec for the 3s.

On my dual core PC the numbers are a bit lower because the bus and the main drive are slower. Even so pulling from the 6 Gb/sec drives is still over 110 MB/sec with the 3s showing in the 70 to 100 MB/sec sequential read range.

On both machines Caviar Blacks plugged into docking stations are faster than the system drives that came with the machine. Being HP they are 3 Gb sec Sata. Not sure exactly what's in the quad because it has some weird fake raid setup that blocks any smart info about the drive and controller. All I know is the HD that came with the quad is 750 GB single drive.

I get transfer rates comparable with the speed of the drives. Copying from one USB 3.0 dock to another both hooked to the same card has no bogging effect. Doesn't run up the cpu much either. Perhaps other cards are different. I bought one SIIG USB 3.0 and liked it so I got another. I haven't tried any others.

One thing interesting, while I was waiting for my USB 3.0 docking stations to arrive, just for grins I hooked up a USB 2.0 Seagate external to the SIIG card. I got about an 18% increase in throughput. Large sequential writes went from 24 MB/sec or less to about 30 MB/sec or a tad more.

 

[Mike Connor]

Something is weird! Tested a lot of USB 3.0 stuff recently on a lot of boards, in a whole load of cases it reverts to legacy ( 2.0) mode, or only gives marginally better performance, ( 10...30 % )

Why? Don't know, but it is particularly bad with NEC chips.

Regards....Mike Connor

 

[MilesAhead]

Hmmmmm, just to make sure we're not apples & oranges, this is the card I have in my PCs:

Newegg.com - SIIG JU-P20412-S2 PCI Express to 2-Port USB 3.0 SuperSpeed Card

Not the "1 external 1 internal" port type. I've had no side effects I can detect other than the drives in the docks being faster than the system drives. Best thing I added since a Gb wired network card in the dual core.

If people are trying them with externals rather than docks I'm wondering if there's a bottleneck inside the external USB 3.0 drives themselves?

 

[kixs]

@Mike Connor:
what model of Sharkoon docking station do you use?

I have Sharkoon SATA QuickPort Duo USB3.0 -v.2- and with Windows XP it worked perfectly. Copying from one port to the other was quick - around 71MB/s with WD Green 2TB EARS disks. Copying to internal WD 640GB Blue was around 100MB/s. Which is quite OK.

Then I installed W7x64. Copying to internal HDD from the dock is the same. But copying between ports is quite slower. I get around 40MB/s while copying the same files!

I have a new Asus motherboard with NEC USB3.0 on-board. I installed the latest drivers and upgraded the firmware. SONY/NEC firmwares.

Does anyone have any idea what's wrong with W7???

I'm thinking of installing WinXP again

Regards.

 

[Mike Connor]

My motherboard supports USB 3.0 directly, so I can use any 3.0 USB device. Some work fine, some don't. Just how it is!

For external storage I now mostly use eSATA.

Regards....Mike Connor

 

[kixs]

My bad... My reply was actually for MilesAhead

 

[MilesAhead]

My bad... My reply was actually for MilesAhead

All my docks are the single drive type. For Sharkoon it's this one:

Newegg.com - Sharkoon SATA QuickPort USB3.0 2.5" & 3.5" Black USB 3.0 Docking Stations

The SIIG's are this model:
Newegg.com - SIIG SC-SA0D12-S1 2.5" & 3.5" Black USB 3.0 Drive Docking with Fan

(The SIIG looks like a dual dock. But it isn't. They must have decided to save money by using the same base for both versions. Plus it has a built-in fan. Even though it's a bit bulkier and you hear some fan, the drives run noticeably cooler. Doesn't burn your hand to pull the drive out.)

The USB 3.0 stuff runs fine on Vista64 SP1.

Do you have 2 separate USB 3 cables in the Sharkoon? I imagine it must but I don't know.

 

[MilesAhead]

My motherboard supports USB 3.0 directly, so I can use any 3.0 USB device. Some work fine, some don't. Just how it is!

For external storage I now mostly use eSATA.

Regards....Mike Connor

I've heard in many cases the add-in card is better than on board native USB 3.0 since the add-in card hardware does the work. But it probably varies with the system. That could explain why I see a lot of surprise how slow USB 3.0 is.