Acceptable transfer rate for WD my passport ultra 2TB drive?

martin57

Point taken Closed but for a small outlay for a card say £10 or so and if it improves the speed from 26 to say 80mb per sec then I think for myself probably worth it.


Thanks
Martin57

kwikbreaks

I've fitted a USB3 card and a typical transfer speed for me to hub powered (so 2.5 inch) external drives is about 70-80Mbps. I get similar with 3.5 inch drives in a USB 3 dock. If you are moving lots of data around then imo the pretty small outlay is worthwhile. Even if it's only moving a few GB to a (USB3 obviously) flash drive it's nice to get it done quickly.

My card had extra headers but most of the internal cables I could find were pretty short - I couldn't find any easy way to upgrade the front ports on my machine but I'm limited as it's small form factor. I don't remember if there were USB3 panels which would fit a full size machine in the old floppy bay but that would maybe be the way forward.

Slithery

martin57 wrote: »

Just another question if I may, since I have a few usb ports at front of computer is it at all possible to get one of those usb3 cards that will have an extra connection so that I could get the front ports of computer to work with usb3 as well? Probably not.

Nope.

USB2 and USB3 ports are physically different.

Avoriaz

poppellerant wrote: »

Avoriaz, I think your point is that you have to mess about to get fast speeds which isn't worth the it takes to do. Assuming 30MB/sec for 30 minutes, you're only transferring around 52GB - the OP has a 2TB harddrive, which about 1.8TB when formatted. It would take around 17 hours with a USB 2.0 port to fill the OP's drive up.

Assuming the drive can write constantly at about 125MB/sec with a USB 3.0 port, it would only take about 4 hours to fill the drive. Let's be generous and give the OP a full hour to install the USB 3.0 card - they have still saved time!

Not really.

It takes real time to install a card but doing a backup only requires the time needed to set up the equipment and start the process going.

During the time that the computer spends doing a backup the OP can be doing something else on the computer or anything else he chooses.

He doesn't need to watch the entire backup process.

I occasionally do 15 to 18 hour backups of my Sky+ disk. I just start it going and leave it running overnight and into the morning.

Nilrem

What's the interface on the drive?

If it's not USB3 then there is no point in changing the USB ports on your PC, as you don't see much difference.

One possible cheap way to improve performance is, if the drive is usb 2, make sure you connect it to the motherboard ports directly with nothing else on the controller (IE you normally find the ports in pairs, connect only the drive to one pair of ports), that means that the drive is getting the full available bandwidth to itself.

I've got a few external drives here including an old caddy with USB2 and eSATA, a WD 2tb drive with a USB2 connection and a WD with a USB3 connection.

The USB2 drives max out at about 40MB/s (all the drives are 3.5" ones), but if I move the old caddy over to an eSATA connection it's speed goes up to about 90MB/s (probably the limit of the drive in it, as it's got a drive that is about 4-5 years old)