Question External USB 3.0 HD transfer rate... why so slow?

Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
Muse

Muse

Lifer
Jul 11, 2001
36,933
7,817
136
TOSHIBA 3TB Canvio Basics Portable Hard Drive USB 3.0 Model HDTB330XK3CA. I plugged it into a USB 3.0 port on this Lenovo P1 Gen3 laptop using the super speed cable the drive came with. Copied a 4GB file on the external HD onto the Windows 10 clipboard and pasted it into a folder on the main SSD drive in the laptop. If the 5GBPS spec of the USB 3.0 cable is what I can expect I'd think this would take less than a second. It took 35 seconds.

Is it the nature of the data? It's the inbox of my email client filled with thousands and thousands of messages, attachments.
 
Sort by date Sort by votes
Shmee

Shmee

Memory & Storage, Graphics Cards Mod Elite Member
Super Moderator
Sep 13, 2008
7,099
2,223
136
This is because the HDD inside is the bottleneck. It will be reading much slower than 5Gb/s.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
SamMaster

SamMaster

Member
Jun 26, 2010
142
71
101
Mechanical drives are slower then the USB3 speeds. 5Gb/S is the max theoretical speed and doesn't include overhead from USB hardware and the other connected hardware. You will never see that speed, even with NVME USB drives. On top of that, manufacturers tend to not use the best drives in those external drive packages. They are mainly used as storage drives and not work drives and are equipped as such.

There are exceptions, but that is what I have experienced and learned throughout my years. Open to corrections of course :)

edit: Shmee beat me to it
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: Shmee
Upvote 0 Downvote
sdifox

sdifox

No Lifer
Sep 30, 2005
93,645
14,275
126
Do you need it to be portable? Usually those portable 2.5" drives are slow as snails.
slickDeals mentions Newegg has the wd 12 tb ext hdd going for 180. That will be faster than your current drive. or go ext ssd if you need it to be portable.


Another thing, transfer speed is in gigabits, not gigabytes. So the 5gbps bandwidth is about 625MBps not counting overheads. Not even sata ssd can saturate that.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: mxnerd
Upvote 0 Downvote
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom