USB2.0 external drive transfer rate.

KK

Lifer
Jan 2, 2001
15,903
4
81
I just moved up to USB2 in my pc by adding a usb2 pci card. Anyways, I just also got an external usb2 drive enclosure that I put a wd 200gb drive in. I have a 80Gb ATA100 WD drive in the pc. How long should it take to transfer say 1GB of data? Should 1GB of data take ~9 minutes?

KK
 

Kenazo

Lifer
Sep 15, 2000
10,429
1
81
Theoretically, 480Mbits/second = 60MB/s, which means that it should take about 17seconds for 1 gig to transfer, howerver that never seems to happen. I find Firewire external solutions to be far, far quicker.
 

AWhackWhiteBoy

Golden Member
Mar 3, 2004
1,807
0
0
firewire isn't far and away quicker,but its slightly faster due to the protocol raw nature, even with its smaller bandwidth. USB uses lots of error correction, thats why its so popular and user friendly.

i get transfer rates of about 18megabytes a second with my external USB drive,bursts of 26megs sometimes.

i don't think it should take more than 9 minutes though,unless you have lots of other programs running on the PC that is writing info to the drive too, then your heads will be jumping all over the place making the transfer extremely slow.
 

KK

Lifer
Jan 2, 2001
15,903
4
81
Okay, I think I found the problem. I tried formating the hard drive again, (The drive was previously formated inside the pc connected to the motherboard) and it wouldn't format by either a quick format or a full format. I then realized I didn't ever change the jumper on the drive. Pulled it out and it was set for master/with slave. Pulled the jump off and if formated and is now trnasfering at a much faster rate.

KK