The better external HDD to choose? Portable/Desktop?

Oblivion

karvala wrote: »

I would class that as faulty, and I suspect a problem with the cache memory. If you're doing a sequential transfer, even the oldest, poorest HDD over USB 2.0 should perform much better than that. Have you tested it with Seatools (the hope being that it will fail and you can RMA it)?

Actually I've had a bit of a breakthrough this afternoon. Just playing in settings and with one of the Seagates attached to a USB2 port I tested it ... transfer rate 3MB/s


So then I went into Device Manager and just meddled, asking it to update the driver (no, it was current), then I noticed the Policies tab had 'Write Caching' turned off so I turned it on, and then I Populated the drive info.


I have no idea which of these moves changed things but having done the same for both Seagates they are now transferring at around 80MB/s :j


Unfortunately the USB3 port only offers the same, no speed improvement, but having done some more googling this seems to be a real problem with incompatibility between motherboards, Intel chipsets, drivers etc etc. The internet is full of people complaining that their USB3 ports are as slow as, if not slower than their USB2 ports.


Anyway, 80MB/s is quite enough for my purposes so I'm a happy bunny.

Stompa

Oblivion wrote: »

I have no idea which of these moves changed things but having done the same for both Seagates they are now transferring at around 80MB/s

Unfortunately the USB3 port only offers the same, no speed improvement

Given that the maximum theoretical speed for USB2 is 60MB/s, that seems a bit weird!