USB 3 broken on WIN10?

Moonpie2 · 30 Oct 2019 at 09:49

Hi there

I have seen this across numerous Win10 PCs and using a multitude of USB sticks and using front ports and also back panel IO.

When transferring to the stick, the speed goes up and down like a roller-coaster from around 30mbps down to 0mbps, then after a second or so, it raises back up to 30mbps.
Rinse and repeat until the entire file is transferred.

Is this a known issue?
It feels like it must be, but I can't find any specific fix online.
Only general 'suggestions' about formatting the stick and using eject to treat the stick better.

Anyone know or have any advice?

ED209 · 31 Oct 2019 at 08:16

Have you made sure that the chipset and USB drivers are all up to date from the motherboard manufacturers website?

I have Windows 10 Pro 64 bit and a I79700k without any issues on transferring to USB or external HDD.

If you do any speed tests on the USB stick does it show as working ok? also what files are you transfering to the USB stick, lots of little files or one large file?

Donnie Fisher · 31 Oct 2019 at 09:20

I've seen this too. I think its down to the USB sticks and their buffer caches filling up. So the USB stick initially accepts the data into its buffer cache, then it transfers it internally from the buffer into the slower long term memory space of the drive. So the buffer cache might be very fast hence the initial burst of accepting data, but the internal transfer much much slower. The trouble might be that whilst its doing the internal tranferring and clearing the buffer, it wont accept more data... hence the pause in transfer rates.

This sort of approach probably worked well enough for a lot of USB sticks which historically were quite small and the files being put into them were quite small too. Things like word documents and a few images etc. With that sort of use, a USB stick would very quickly accept the data sent to it into the cache, and show the transfer complete to the user, but internally it might do some background processing to file away the data properly for later. Imagine your USB is a library and your data is a book and your putting it into a library to store for later. You hand the book to the librarian, so to you it feels like you've passed the data over. It might take a wee while for the librarian to then acutally go and put it on the shelf. Whilst that librarian is away doing that, they aren't at the desk to accept more books to hand in.

As memory chips have gotten larger, so have USB drives, so it wouldn't surprise me if drive makers simply replaced memory chips in their designs with a larger ones, and left all the other stuff like buffers, caches and controllers as before. So now you're transferring larger files, but its pausing after each time the buffer fills. ... making the whole thing really slow.

For the likes of USB hard drives and SSD's this is less likely an issue because they are designed to accept much larger amounts of data in a sustained single transfer, and also to be able to manage the internal transfer of buffer data into the longer term memory - hence the better large filesize performance.

Moonpie2 · 1 Nov 2019 at 06:50

Thanks for the replies.

Although your explanation sounds logical, Donnie, I kinda refuse to believe that the pinnacle of USB transfer technology behaves in the way we've been discussing and you can see in the below videos.
And I'm almost 99% sure this did not happen with the same USBs when I had a Win7 PC.

As for ED209's suggestion about the chipset drivers. My USB controllers in Device Manager all look ok, no errors being shown.
And if I look at my Mobo support page, I'm not even seeing any USB chipset downloads :/
https://www.asrock.com/MB/AMD/X570M Pro4/index.asp#Download

Also here's a speedtest on the stick.

And here's 2 examples of my transfer rates on my PC (and also remember, I see this same behavior on 2 other Win10 PC's I've checked)

BIG 2GB FILE

2 ALBUM TRANSFER

So yeah.... I still ask... any help or suggestions?

Donnie Fisher · 1 Nov 2019 at 09:06

I still personally think my suggestion applies. A quick google of your drive brings up the some of the same issues and the same comments about buffer flushing causing the swings in data transfer rates.

Here is one:

https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/kingston-dt50-64gb-writing-speed-and-behavior.3498196/

As for the benchmark results above ... your write speeds look very roughly about 4MB/s on average ... if you were to transfer a 400MB file, would that take 100 seconds including the yo-yo transfer rate on the progress bar ? if so, then that to me suggests buffer filling and flushing occuring which is averaging out to the 4MB/s

You can look at disk write caching settings for the drive ... disabling it might give you a non-cached smoother transfer which is at the basic sustained write rate.

I kinda refuse to believe that the pinnacle of USB transfer technology behaves in the way we've been discussing

You need to be clear that just because a device has a USB 3 interface on it, that does not mean that the underlying hardware device is going to work at full USB 3 speed. It could well be USB 2 era hardware connecting through a USB 3 interface.

Moonpie2 · 1 Nov 2019 at 10:23

Just timed a transfer and it took 35 seconds to transfer 350mb.
So 10 MB/ps
Also did 2150mb in 3m13s
So 11MB/ps

So yeah, it's looking like my Kingston is either a dodgy Chinese knock-off (speed wise, the size seems fine), or it's really just the lowest possible quality of USB3 it's possible to get.
And again, knowing where I am located, I wouldn't be doing the surprised Pikachu face if I had other 'less than stellar quality USBs'.

I may have to test with other USBs and also possible other PCs.

bledd · 1 Nov 2019 at 13:13

Nice posts @Donnie Fisher

Could well be a fake USB if it's not performing as expected.

Donnie Fisher · 1 Nov 2019 at 22:46

I dont think its necessarily fake ... its just that is how it is designed, possibly based on a revision of older generation hardware which has a base write speed of 10MB/s

darael · 10 Nov 2019 at 23:38

Something I've noticed with USB 3 ports on my PC is that the icon for USB drives is different for some drives. More confusingly the icon is normal for the same drives plugged into USB 2 ports.

Sandisk Extreme Pro plugged into USB 2 port:

The same Sandisk Extreme Pro plugged into a USB 2 port:

b00merang69 · 10 Nov 2019 at 23:46

Tall icon may be HUB on Mobo, I see same for my card reader.

darael · 10 Nov 2019 at 23:59

b00merang69 said:
Tall icon may be HUB on Mobo, I see same for my card reader.

It's only recently changed to this. I will have a pole around and see what I find, but it's annoying.

Nevakonaza · 11 Nov 2019 at 18:17

I've noticed sometimes my usb 3.0 ports regardless of whether its on the back of the motherboard or on the case sometimes refuses to pick up USB thumb drive,even tried different one to make sure it wasn't the drive..however a system restart fixes it its so odd.

Using a X470 ryzen based system.

chrismox · 24 Nov 2019 at 23:28

I missed this thread before, I’ve been having the same issues: https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/threads/copy-to-usb-stick-stopping-and-starting.18869746/

Did you ever find a solution?

Moonpie2 · 25 Nov 2019 at 00:54

chrismox said:
I missed this thread before, I’ve been having the same issues: https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/threads/copy-to-usb-stick-stopping-and-starting.18869746/

Did you ever find a solution?

I think Donnie Fisher's got it right. Regardless of whether it's a broken USB or Fake USB or low quality USB, the problem does finally seem to be in the thumb drive itself and not the PC.

chrismox · 25 Nov 2019 at 08:26

Moonpie2 said:
I think Donnie Fisher's got it right. Regardless of whether it's a broken USB or Fake USB or low quality USB, the problem does finally seem to be in the thumb drive itself and not the PC.

The thing that I don’t really get is why it’s happening all of a sudden to numerous USB sticks in different PCs, all of which used to work fine. Very odd.

SmokeKingGun · 27 Nov 2019 at 18:43

not sure if same with USB sticks, but to get full speed on USB hard drive would have to make sure to enablle write caching on the device. check in device manager, right click on device (usb stick in disk drives), properties, policies - make sure better performance write caching enabled.

and always use the eject drive option when removing or may lose data.

Blackjack Davy · 10 Dec 2019 at 17:47

I noticed this too, quite frustrating

chrismox said:
The thing that I don’t really get is why it’s happening all of a sudden to numerous USB sticks in different PCs, all of which used to work fine. Very odd.

Apparently in 1809 they changed the default behaviour to disable caching you have to enable it in Disk Management and its per drive and I think if the letter changes you have to enable it all over again

more here

Moonpie2 · 11 Dec 2019 at 03:40

Just did a test and for me, the speeds were identical on my flash drive whether caching is enabled or not.
Also still had the roller-coaster up and down write speeds.