usb3 write speeds for external harddrives

[bononos]

What sort of average write speeds are people usually getting for external harddrives on usb3?
I got about 44Mb/s (write) on a 3Tb seagate on a z68 motherboard backing up data using the usb3 port. Testing out a few files on usb2 showed around 31Mb/s.

 

[Cerb]

If you get a USB 3.0 enclosure, and a new 7200 RPM drive, you should get 95%+ native speeds, barring a bad cable, or controller compatibility (Z68 has no USB 3.0 support, so that means nothing). 150-250MB/s should be possible, depending on host controller, bridge, and how well they play with each other.

If you buy a penny-pinching prebuilt, expect the slowest model HDD they could make, and don't get excited about the bridge chip, either.

 

[smitbret]

I put a new Seagate in a USB 3.0 enclosure and got 85-95MB/s when I used it. The same drive used internally averages about 146MB/s. On the same PC my Toshiba Canvio Desktop USB 3.0 gets about 110-120MB/s. You should definitely be getting faster than what you are, though.

 

[JAG87]

110MB/s is about the fastest I've seen, pretty sure it's HDD limited.

 

[holden j caufield]

is this an external usb 3.0 power portable drive with low cache and 2.5 low rpm drive? That's what I got on my portable seagate drive. I get about 110mb/s on my esata connection for backups but I think I'm reaching the max of a 7200rpm drive.

 

[smitbret]

It's a 2TB 3.5" Seagate. The enclosure is has its own power supply. To be fair, I haven't been much impressed with it in general. I just assumed that kind of performance was about par for external enclosures considering my Toshiba External is about 30% faster.

 

[smitbret]

And it was a 7200 rpm HDD, BTW.

 

[bononos]

If you get a USB 3.0 enclosure, and a new 7200 RPM drive, you should get 95%+ native speeds, barring a bad cable, or controller compatibility (Z68 has no USB 3.0 support, so that means nothing). 150-250MB/s should be possible, depending on host controller, bridge, and how well they play with each other.

If you buy a penny-pinching prebuilt, expect the slowest model HDD they could make, and don't get excited about the bridge chip, either.

I forgot that z68 doesn't support usb3, the mb has an etron chip. And the drive is a Seagate barracuda has 1tb platters. I just copied over a few large files over (from an internal harddrive) to get the approx write speeds in my OP while quickly checking that it worked. 150-250Mb sounds like the read speeds which I didn't check.

It seems like my write speed is on the low end.. Maybe the etron chip is just slow.

 

[Lordhumungus]

All of the drives linked there are 2.5". You are actually bordering on really high USB 2.0 speeds, so part of me wonders if that's not actually what's happening. Theoretically, you are probably ~+4-8 MB/s over 2.0, but that seems suspiciously slow for 3.0.

Edit: I'm leaning even more towards USB 2.0 speeds since I read you only quickly copied some files which may represent the burst as opposed to the sustained write.

 

[bononos]

I figured it out. The source drive in my test was an older slower model (and not aligned to boot) which just killed the transfer speeds. When I tried copying over files again from a faster drive (still not as fast as the 1tb/platter barracuda I was copying to), the transfer speed was ~130Mb/s tops and the burst/cached speeds (on recopied files) were over 3-4x higher.