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Do I need a special USB cable for USB 3.0 data transfers?

Muse

Muse

Lifer
I just did a data transfer from my NAS (Synology DS214Play) to a Toshiba Canvio 3TB USB 3.0 HD and it took 18 hours (1.25TB data). That seems slow to me. The Synology support rep I talked to today said the port on the NAS supports USB 3.0. AFAIK the cable I used wasn't designed for USB 3.0, but was from the USB 2.0 era. Do I need a different cable for this, one specifically made for USB 3.0 usage?
 
Looking, I see that the cable on that HD is proprietary, no doubt supplied by Toshiba and it says USB 3.0 on it.

Question remains: Old USB 2.0 cables won't work for USB 3.0 data transfer?

Also, is 18 hours a reasonable time for 1.25TB data transfer at USB 3.0 speeds?
 
If you want USB 3.0 speed, you do.
your transfer speed looked to be 19.2 Mb/sec. That certainly looks like USB 2.0 type speed.

All my USB 3.0 transfers have been with the USB 3.0 cables supplies.

1544158294329.jpeg

They claim 10X speed over 2.0 and I've never seen that speed but I have seen 3x-5x increase depending on the size of the files being transferred.

https://www.howtogeek.com/222400/do-usb-3.0-connections-require-usb-3.0-cables/
 
Muse said:
Looking, I see that the cable on that HD is proprietary, no doubt supplied by Toshiba and it says USB 3.0 on it.

Question remains: Old USB 2.0 cables won't work for USB 3.0 data transfer?

Also, is 18 hours a reasonable time for 1.25TB data transfer at USB 3.0 speeds?
Click to expand...
It depends on the device. IIRC, the voltage needed for some USB 3.0 may be higher than the 0.5 Amp that USB 2.0 outlets, supply.
So some USB 2.0 cables, may not work.

Assuming your files are evenly mixed and you didn't have a majority of small files, I would expect 50-60 MB/sec transfer speed from
USB 3.0 to another USB 3.0 device. So basically, a third of the time you had for the USB 2.0
i.e. 6 hours.

Just my best guess.
 
does your usb cable for the drive look anything like this?
https://www.cablestogo.com/product/54176/1m-usb-3.0-a-male-to-micro-b-male-cable-3.3ft

i have an early model of a usb3 Toshiba drive and it came with a standard usb3 cable/port.

your transfer speed isn't correct for usb3. i have a synology 1817+ at home and i use 3.5" hdd in a usb3 dock to backup files. 6-7 TB doesn't take 18 hours. or maybe close. been a while sense i've done a full backup on a bare drive.
 
JoeBleed said:
does your usb cable for the drive look anything like this?
https://www.cablestogo.com/product/54176/1m-usb-3.0-a-male-to-micro-b-male-cable-3.3ft

i have an early model of a usb3 Toshiba drive and it came with a standard usb3 cable/port.

your transfer speed isn't correct for usb3. i have a synology 1817+ at home and i use 3.5" hdd in a usb3 dock to backup files. 6-7 TB doesn't take 18 hours. or maybe close. been a while sense i've done a full backup on a bare drive.
Click to expand...
Yeah, the cable I used looks like that. It had to have come in the box for the Toshiba Canvio 3TB USB 3.0 HD. It's a really small drive, pretty much the size of a men's wallet, maybe 5/8" thick. That slowness is something I could live with, maybe have to. The drive was brand new when I plugged it in early this morning (2AM), and I backed up everything on the NAS, basically. In the future, the backups should be incremental and pretty quick, even at USB 2.0 speeds. Maybe I'll call Synology and ask them if they have any idea why the backup was so slow. I called them twice today for help with the backup... I'm still not too knowledgeable on how Hyper Backup works, but I got some good ideas from the 2nd guy. The first guy didn't know his beans.
 
Muse said:
Looking, I see that the cable on that HD is proprietary, no doubt supplied by Toshiba and it says USB 3.0 on it.
Click to expand...

I wouldn't think Toshiba would bother using anything proprietary today.

If I'm looking at the correct drive it looks like a standard USB3 Micro B socket. IMHO the worst piece of plug/socket design today...

BTW, welcome to the weird, wonderful world of USB connectors:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_(Physical)#Connectors

Muse said:
Question remains: Old USB 2.0 cables won't work for USB 3.0 data transfer?

Also, is 18 hours a reasonable time for 1.25TB data transfer at USB 3.0 speeds?
Click to expand...

No. USB3 has five more wires/connectors then a USB1/2 cable. A USB2 cable work fine as a USB2 cable at USB2 speeds. USB3 devices/controllers are fully backwards compatible, but you wont be able to use USB3's new features.

Speedwise, 18 hours for 1.25TB sounds more like USB2 speed*. As have been pointed out earlier in the thread. With a proper USB3 connection with UASP, the speed limit is the HDD itself for all practical purposes (SSDs are a slightly different matter).

*Unless you're transferring large amounts of small (<10MB) files
 
As stated by a couple of others now, small files do seem to transfer a lot slower. the vast majority of my backups, when i first started them, are large files from CD, DVD, and Blu-ray iso rips i've been adding.

Have you tried the drive on a PC for transferring some files and speed tests? Happen to have another cable?

A note about hyper backup. If you do the standard backup, you will need hyper backup to restore files from what i read. I've opted to just do a copy and i have several drives for revisions. It's home use and doesn't change much so it works fine for me. I'm not overly concerned with lots of revisions for backups; more so lose of files. To aid in this, i format the drives connected to windows in NTFS. The synology unit i have reads and writes to NTFS. This way, if i needed to, i can pull up any backed up files directly from the drive on any computer i can connect it to that can read NTFS. The synology unit will not format in NTFS. at least from the web interface. you probably could do it from ssh.

I mention this because some of their other units may be restricted and not even read NTFS (just a guess). I don't know why, but i've seen things mentioned not being available in smaller units.

If you're looking more drives for backup, i like waiting for WD EasyStore 8TB drives to go on sale at BestBuy. you can use them in their usb3 enclosure or shuck them like it do. The EasyStore are BestBuy exclusives so i would avoid buying them from Amazon or eBay. Fair chance someone stripped the drive out and stuck something else in there or is just selling at a mark up. They're currently still on sale for $139.00 https://www.bestbuy.com/site/wd-eas...-3-0-hard-drive-black/5792401.p?skuId=5792401
 
JoeBleed said:
Have you tried the drive on a PC for transferring some files and speed tests? Happen to have another cable?

A note about hyper backup. If you do the standard backup, you will need hyper backup to restore files from what i read. I've opted to just do a copy and i have several drives for revisions. I

I mention this because some of their other units may be restricted and not even read NTFS (just a guess). I don't know why, but i've seen things mentioned not being available in smaller units.

If you're looking more drives for backup, i like waiting for WD EasyStore 8TB drives to go on sale at BestBuy. you can use them in their usb3 enclosure or shuck them like it do. The EasyStore are BestBuy exclusives so i would avoid buying them from Amazon or eBay. Fair chance someone stripped the drive out and stuck something else in there or is just selling at a mark up. They're currently still on sale for $139.00 https://www.bestbuy.com/site/wd-eas...-3-0-hard-drive-black/5792401.p?skuId=5792401
Click to expand...
ATM I don't have a computer that supports USB 3.0, but I'm picking up a shipment at the post office tomorrow morning that contains such a system.

I just brought that HD to my bank and put it in my safe deposit box, brought home its twin (Also Toshiba Canvio, etc.), and have it plugged into this Win10 32bit laptop. It's NTFS and I can see the data. Probably because I didn't do the default Hyper Backup but instead turned off compression.
 
Did you say your other drive runs at the correct speed?

I've been testing some 8TB easystores i picked up and two of them run at usb2 speeds on a couple of computers; but not all. all of the computers i've tried them on are the same model and do have usb3. i've used them to test drives before. It's odd. when the other two finish a test i'm going to swap computers around to see if the problem is the computer or those particular drives with particular computers.
 
JoeBleed said:
Did you say your other drive runs at the correct speed?
Click to expand...
I don't know yet. I brought it home when I put its twin to my safe deposit box a week ago or so. It's not really a twin and not bought at the same time but many months apart, just the same make and model AFAIK. I'll do a backup to the one I brought home last week and try to monitor the speed, however it won't be a full backup like I did with the other, it will be an incremental backup, in all likelihood.
 
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