USB 3 transfer speed

50Twuncle

What speed would you expect from a WD MY PASSPORT USB 3 drive - when connected to a USB 3 socket on a laptop ?
I am currently backing up 30Gb of docs and other files and getting less than 25MB/s
Does this appear slightly slow ?

ARandomMiser

Often depends on file size. If you are backing up a large number of small files then the speed will drop, if it is a small number of large files then it will be much quicker.

Neil_Jones

Like all good computer questions, there is more to this than you'd think.

USB 3 can in theory transfer data at the speed of lightning BUT it can only send/receive data as fast as the host can deal with it. On a laptop (and to a certain extent a desktop too) the limiting factor is the speed of its hard drive. It can't send any data faster than it already is, as the drive will only spin at a pre-determined rate.

Also note the transfer you see is typically an average. It will shoot up when you copy whopping great muti-Gb files and fall through the floor when you copy lots of little sub <100k files.

DavidP24

Sounds as if your socket is USB2

Nilrem

DavidP24 wrote: »

Sounds as if your socket is USB2

I think this is going to be it if the drive is usb 3 capable.

I routinely get 90-150MB/s via usb 3 to external usb3 drives when dealing with larger files whilst 25MB/s is about what you can get with usb2 a lot of the time.

DavidP24

I do not think OP would come on asking about speed if it was variable, seems max is 25

Fact is if a Laptop or PC has USB2, then USB2 is what you get, the USB3 drive is backward compatible to USB2.

I did buy a USB3 card via slot for my laptop and it was a waste of money

When I got AC adapter and transfered wirelessly to AC router to my NAS I got way better speeds, much faster than the build in Wired 100mb, but for that laptop USB2 was the best I was going to ever get.

50Twuncle

DavidP24 wrote: »

Sounds as if your socket is USB2

No - it IS USB 3

slinga

Neil_Jones wrote: »

Like all good computer questions, there is more to this than you'd think.

USB 3 can in theory transfer data at the speed of lightning BUT it can only send/receive data as fast as the host can deal with it. On a laptop (and to a certain extent a desktop too) the limiting factor is the speed of its hard drive. It can't send any data faster than it already is, as the drive will only spin at a pre-determined rate.

Also note the transfer you see is typically an average. It will shoot up when you copy whopping great muti-Gb files and fall through the floor when you copy lots of little sub <100k files.

I've got USB 3 on my desktop and laptop but only use USB 2 as my cameras, flash drives and external HDD are only USB 2.

But I do as you suggest find vastly different transfer speeds depending on which devices are used and which way the transfer is operating.

paddyrg

50Twuncle wrote: »

No - it IS USB 3

So just to clarify, the tang inside the USB socket on the laptop is blue, not black? If so, it may be a driver issue, with the ports failing back to USB2.

The hard drive of the laptop speed is very likely the main bottleneck though - in order to extend battery life they tend to spin slowly.

50Twuncle

paddyrg wrote: »

So just to clarify, the tang inside the USB socket on the laptop is blue, not black? If so, it may be a driver issue, with the ports failing back to USB2.

The hard drive of the laptop speed is very likely the main bottleneck though - in order to extend battery life they tend to spin slowly.

Blue yes ....