Write speeds of a Freecom 250gb External Hard Drive

[Cellulose]

A brand new, 250gb Freecom "ToughDrive" formatted to NTFS with a 4kb unit size is currently achieving a write speed of around 20 mintues+ for 2gb worth of files (23 items) in Vista.

Is this normal for such a drive? Seems a little slow - 30gb of music took hours and hours...

Can anything be done to improve speeds?

Thanks.

 

[EarthwormJim]

Go to My Computer, once there right click the drive.

Click Properties, click the Hardware tab, find the drive and click properties.

Under the Policies tab, make sure the "Optimize for performance" circle is checked, and check the two boxes below it. Enable write caching and enable enhanced performance.

One important thing if you do this, is you have to eject the drive every time you want to unplug it. That little icon in your Notification Area "Safely Remove Hardware," is where you do it.

 

[Cellulose]

Thanks a lot 🙂

The write speeds now start around 56mb/s (w00t!) but unfortunately it very quickly drops to under 10mb/s. It continues to drop and reaches around 7mb/s within a minute and a half.

 

[Cellulose]

Well I tried again hoping this time the intial write speeds would be sustained, however it dropped from 60mb/s (which lasted maybe 5 seconds) to 10mb/s and eventually to 3mb/s by the end (although it was still dropping).

 

[EarthwormJim]

Hmm not really sure then, that's pretty slow.

USB caps out at around 30mb/s a second.

 

[Old Hippie]

I've read about Vista's slow transfer speeds.

I heard MS was addressing this issue in SP1, but here's a discussion with some other suggestions.

Good Luck!

 

[Cellulose]

I just tried transferring files on my laptop, a Vista SP1 machine, it gets sustained results of 10MB/s. I guess I have to be content with that for now.

For my desktop (mentioned in OP) Ill definately have a look at some of the suggestions - thanks 🙂

 

[EarthwormJim]

I see 100mb/s transfer rates between my WD drive and my RAID array, so it's not Vista holding you back (I'm using Vista x64 SP1).

Maybe that drive is just kinda slow, it is a 2.5" drive I believe (5400 rpm).