External usb HD transfer rate extremley slow

martin5454

martin5454

martin5454

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Joined
15 Jan 2009
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139
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Thailand ATM
My external hard drive is mysteriously transferring at as low as 100kb/sec! average is under 1mb. Its never been so slow and I have no idea what to do. Any ideas would be great!
 
One file 1.99G, its only got 4G free out of 300 maybe this is the issue. Had it this low before tho many times and never had and issue. Now my whole pc is running extremely slow too. The CPU n memory usage is well under 50% I dont understand why its running slow when the CPU is not being used
 
martin5454 said:
One file 1.99G, its only got 4G free out of 300 maybe this is the issue. Had it this low before tho many times and never had and issue. Now my whole pc is running extremely slow too. The CPU n memory usage is well under 50% I dont understand why its running slow when the CPU is not being used
Click to expand...

With mechanical hard drives, when they start to get quite full the performance drops because files start to become fragmented (parts of files are stored in different parts of the drive to fill all available space). If it's a backup drive you are less likely to get fragmentation but if you do it will read/write slowly; if it's an OS drive the OS will run slow. It's the hard drive limiting it, not CPU.
 
Is it USB? Something may have caused the drive to negotiate v1 speeds rather than v2. That could account for the ~1MB average. USB1 tops out at 1.5MB per second before overheads are taken off.

If you can access the drive's S.M.A.R.T information check it is not about to die. It could be reallocating lots of bad sectors :/

As mentioned above check how fragmented the drive is.

I suppose first thing I should say is have you tried rebooting :p
 
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