USB transfer rate, slow ??

BEN_UK

BEN_UK

BEN_UK

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
4,257
Location
Nottingham
Hello,

I have a acer laptop which from device manager tells me i have 2 USB 1.1 and 1 USB 2.0 ports. Running Vista on SP1.

I have a WD 250Gb USB 2.0 hard drive.

I have just copied from the laptop to the hard drive music folder which is 5.33Gb which took 11 mins to copy over ???? does this seem to slow ?

Its currently copying picture folder at 14Gb and took 36mins so far with and estimate of 10 mins left to complete.

On the copying window tells u how much longer etc says "speed 5.45 MB/sec"

Does this seems slow transfer rates ?

Thanks Ben
 
Ok thanks.

Just finished copying again, 14.9Gb has taken 50 mins to copy over to the hard drive :confused:

What you think to that ?
 
Seems a little slow but USB was never that good at sustained speeds, always operating better with bursts and using these to make the number sound higher than they are. Definitely a lot faster than 1.1 so you are using the right socket. I usually find a file of around 1GB transferred onto my external drive takes 1-2 minutes so doesn't seem that far out, although maybe a little slow.
 
i get around that on my USB2 to USB2 HDD harddrive aswell, I thought it was quite normal. Though i don't regularly transfer large amounts of data.
 
If you're copying lots of small files, which you will be with mp3's, then expect a big reduction in speed. Blame Vista for that. If you want to test it then transfer a CD image (single ~700MB file) and you should see around 15Mb/sec.
 
GolfBryan said:
Copying files to my external HD is a lot slower than it was using XP. I think it is just a Vista thing!
Click to expand...

There was a Vista bug to do with taking a while just to finish off file transfers back when it was quite new, but it's been fixed now, or at least improved significantly.

The other thing to watch is that your laptop HDD will be a 2.5" drive, somewhat slower than your external (presumably 3.5") drive, so especially with lots of small files, as mentioned, you'll get slower speeds. I think you could test your USB ports more specifically by plugging in another hard drive to your other USB 2.0 port and doing a large file transfer between them, if your laptop HDD can't keep up with the USB specification, but I don't know if it's possible for that to be mobo limited, I don't know the path the data stream takes!

On a slightly curious note, one of my external USB 2.0 drives (a 2.5" one, in fact) seems to achieve ridiculously high write speeds, far faster than USB 2.0 can theoretically achieve. Transferring a 700MB file takes 10s. Surely the cache can't store that much data, meaning it must be written to the drive, but more importantly the theoretical limit for USB is 60MB/s, and this averages 70MB/s. Very strange.
 
miniyazz said:
On a slightly curious note, one of my external USB 2.0 drives (a 2.5" one, in fact) seems to achieve ridiculously high write speeds, far faster than USB 2.0 can theoretically achieve. Transferring a 700MB file takes 10s. Surely the cache can't store that much data, meaning it must be written to the drive, but more importantly the theoretical limit for USB is 60MB/s, and this averages 70MB/s. Very strange.
Click to expand...

have you tried to see the files on another PC? had the file been on the drive previously?
 
Aod said:
have you tried to see the files on another PC? had the file been on the drive previously?
Click to expand...

I tried unplugging it at the instant it finished copying, and the file was corrupted, so it must just be transferring the rest of the data after the dialog box has closed. Shame.. I could have made thousands auctioning it off to technicians wanting to get their hands on it :p
 
Sounds like they did a chep job with the usb2, my desktop to ext usb2 does around 22-27mb/s though it varies depending on file type/size.

MiniYazz

Thats just write caching for ya, check the drive via device manager/disk drives when it's plugged in and you'll probably find it's policies are set for performance - the rest of the writing continues in the background.
 
Steves_pc said:
MiniYazz

Thats just write caching for ya, check the drive via device manager/disk drives when it's plugged in and you'll probably find it's policies are set for performance - the rest of the writing continues in the background.
Click to expand...

Good suggestion, but I just checked and it's actually set for quick removal - write caching is disabled!
 
I get 25mb sec peak on my external WD 250gb hdd. Not sure why yours is low but just thought would add they aren't always *that* slow.
 
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