USB 2.0 storage transfer rate question

Jon123456

Jon123456

Jon123456

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I have recently bought myself a USB 2.0 hard drive (2TB) to backup lots of stuff on my PC. When I use Windows Explorer in my Win XP setup, it seems to take ages to transfer the files across.

How long should it take to transfer - for example - a 500MB file from my hard drive to my USB 2.0 hard drive? It goes through a 7 port USB 2.0 hub if that makes any difference to speed.

It just seems slow!

Thanks,

Jon
 
Theoretically you can get 57 MB/s (480 mbit/s) transfer but real world you might get 40MB/s.

It's slow when you transfer big files.

500MB should take around 13 seconds.

How long is it actually taking?
 
Depends on how good the USB to SATA converter is, I've got a cheap one for testing purposes and even with an SSD connected it only does around 25MB/s.

Does connecting directly make any difference? It shouldn't (unless you have another demanding device on the same hub) but your hub may be faulty or only connecting at USB 1.1
 
The maximum I've ever gotten on USB 2.0 is 30MB/s or 240mbps, which happens to be precisely half of the maximum throughput for the USB 2.0 (480mbps). This leads me to think that the 480mbps figure is actually split into two channels on usb hard disk controllers, upstream and downstream, hence why you only ever reach half the maximum throughput in practice.

Alternatively, I may be talking a load of nonsense.
 
Just did a test. Had two explorer windows open and dragged a 1,154,618 KB file from my hard drive to the USB drive. It took 1m 12s.

Is this slow?

Kaspersky was showing a star next to it so perhaps it was analysing the file as I was copying it across and so slowing down the transfer? Your thoughts?
 
titaniumx3 said:
The maximum I've ever gotten on USB 2.0 is 30MB/s or 240mbps, which happens to be precisely half of the maximum throughput for the USB 2.0 (480mbps). This leads me to think that the 480mbps figure is actually split into two channels on usb hard disk controllers, upstream and downstream, hence why you only ever reach half the maximum throughput in practice.

Alternatively, I may be talking a load of nonsense.
Click to expand...

That makes perfect sense

30 seems to be the limit
 
Coincidence. Maximum throughput for USB 2.0 is about 40 MB/s after overheads so you'd only see 20 MB/s transfers if that were true.

My WD MyBook only managed about 30 MB/s but my USB-to-SATA caddy often gave me 35 MB/s. It should also depend on what else is connected to the hub you're using (a typical motherboard with 12 USB ports has them split between a few hubs).
 
Jon123456 said:
@Dutch Guy, which drive are you referring to, the USB 2.0 drive?
Click to expand...
Yes, maybe it has a External SATA connector on it so you can use that if possible, that works at a much higher speed than USB.

But most likely the drive does not have that connection.
 
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