USB3 transfer speeds

50Twuncle

My newish USB 3 (my passport) HDD drive is supposed to be USB3, yet when plugged into a USB 3 socket on my laptop (with drivers installed) - only transfers data at 12Mbps maximum
Any suggestions why ?

S0litaire

ok checking obvious things first...

Are you using a USB3 cable to attach the drive to the PC?
Are you transferring lots of small files or a few large files?

50Twuncle

S0litaire wrote: »

ok checking obvious things first...

Are you using a USB3 cable to attach the drive to the PC?
Are you transferring lots of small files or a few large files?

Yes and a 500Mb single file

S0litaire

I've seen a few reports that the USB3 drivers can be terrible but most of them are from 2011/12

Is the USB3 onboard or via an add-on card?

They did suggest checking the BIOS for "USB3 Turbo" setting and toggling that!

Or a BIOS update if available!
If it's an Add-on card, looking for another compatible driver might help the speeds.

Failing that i'm out of ideas!

Also they best way to test the speed (according to a few of the sites!) is to transfer a single large 5Gb file. that should give the most accurate transfer speed.

danthemoneysavingman

if you download CrystalDiskMark you can run different read-write tests to give you speeds. good bit of software

50Twuncle

S0litaire wrote: »

I've seen a few reports that the USB3 drivers can be terrible but most of them are from 2011/12

Is the USB3 onboard or via an add-on card?

They did suggest checking the BIOS for "USB3 Turbo" setting and toggling that!

Or a BIOS update if available!
If it's an Add-on card, looking for another compatible driver might help the speeds.

Failing that i'm out of ideas!

Also they best way to test the speed (according to a few of the sites!) is to transfer a single large 5Gb file. that should give the most accurate transfer speed.

This is on a 1 year old Asus X75V laptop
USB3 is onboard - and the BIOS is up to date too (the latest available)
Thanks anyway
It's just that I had expected it to be much MUCH faster (ie at least in the Gbps rather than the 10's Mbps that my PC is reporting the data rate to be.....

kwikbreaks

If nothing is wrong it should be. My portable USB3 drives can run at 100MB/s+ although they are slower copying small files.

I'm assuming yours is showing as 12MB/s and not the 12Mb/s you posted but even that is pathetic as USB2 drives will easily exceed that.

I have no idea why you are getting this problem but there are 79,800 hits on USB3 portable drive slow transfer rate all I can suggest is that you start trawling through them to find a solution.

===

The figures I quoted above were from memory with my desktop. Just rechecked using this low end laptop (I3 HP Pavillion G6 running Win 8) transfering a multi GB file speed was very similar both ways at ~ 75MB/s. The limiting factor must be the laptop as I'm certain it's faster on the desktop. The disks in both the expansion drive and laptop are only 5400 rpm.

Oblivion

One possibility to check ... In Device Manager, right click on the 'My Passport' drive and select properties ... then look at Policies ... make sure it is set to Better Performance instead of the default Quick Removal. I've found this can make a huge difference but you do need to follow the Safe Removal of a USB device religiously to ensure the buffers clear.

almillar

You've gone far more technical and useful than my post but I'll post it anyway - USB3 is just a connection standard, and has nothing to do with the speed of the device on the end of it. It can handle far higher speeds than HDDs can at the moment, so you shouldn't expect that. You can't do 150mph on an Autobahn in a 2CV...

50Twuncle

almillar wrote: »

You've gone far more technical and useful than my post but I'll post it anyway - USB3 is just a connection standard, and has nothing to do with the speed of the device on the end of it. It can handle far higher speeds than HDDs can at the moment, so you shouldn't expect that. You can't do 150mph on an Autobahn in a 2CV...

You can if you fit a ferrari engine !!

JJ_Egan

50Twuncle wrote: »

You can if you fit a ferrari engine !!

No it wont fit .