Another one of those "This device can perform faster...USB 3.0"

[Sicel1304]

Hi all!

Like many others, I've gotten a pop-up message stating that my external HD could perform faster if hooked up to a super-speed USB 3.0 port. The only problem, is that it IS hooked up to a super-speed USB 3.0 port, and I'm still getting really sub-par speeds when transferring data between my internal HD's to my external HD. I've checked the connections, I've checked the cables, and I'm still not getting the advertised speeds.

Here's a list of my current hardware, I hope this may help.

OS: Windows 7 64-bit Professional edition

PSU: CORSAIR Enthusiast Series CMPSU-650TX 650W ATX12V / EPS12V SLI Ready 80 PLUS Certified Active PFC Compatible with Core i7 Power Supply (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139005)


Motherboard: ASUS M4A79XTD EVO AM3 AMD 790X ATX AMD Motherboard (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131402)

Hard Drives: Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 ST3160023AS 160GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 1.5Gb/s 3.5" Hard Drive -Bare Drive (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148018)

Western Digital WD360GD-00FNA0 36GB, 10K RPM (http://www.diskdrivefinder.com/serv...360GD-00FNA0&gclid=CJC6qJ2F560CFUSo4AodsVExtQ)

Western Digital My Passport Essential 500GB Portable Hard Drive (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136751)

CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition Deneb 3.4GHz Socket AM3 125W Quad-Core Processor HDZ965FBGMBOX (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103727)

Video card: SAPPHIRE 100315L Radeon HD 6850 1GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.1 x16 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102908)

Sound card: Creative Sound Blaster Audigy2 ZS (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16829102178)

RAM: G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory Model F3-12800CL9D-4GBRL (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231277)

Rosewill 6.56 ft. USB3.0 A Male to Micro B Male Cable (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812119286)

Rosewill 2-Port USB 3.0 PCI Express Card Model RC-505 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815166026)


I have NOT overclocked my CPU or messed with the voltage or anything like that. My tech knowledge is way below that level. Let me know if you have any other questions or may be able to help. Thanks for all your time!

 

[hitechgowthaman]

U r did not mention how much speed u get 7200Rpm 160Gb segate medium tranfer rate 50mb/sec max 75mb/sec only

 

[nukemaster]

Are you sure the board you link is the one you have? It has no USB 3 ports.

If it is another board with usb 3....
Are you sure you installed the USB 3 drivers? Without them, a usb 3 port will work just like a USB 2.0 port.

The same thing happened back when USB 2 came out. Without the drivers, you go usb1.x

What are your transfer speeds like?

 

[Sicel1304]

Hey Nukemaster,

Thanks for looking over my post. The motherboard itself does not have any USB 3.0 ports, only USB 2.0. That's why I bought the Rosewill USB 3.0 PCI Express card.

I installed the USB 3.0 drivers that came with the Rosewill add-on card.

My transfer speeds are hovering between 10 - 20 MB per second.

 

[nukemaster]

My bad about the card, just saw the cable.

Please make sure the cable is pushed all the way in. this is important on the card side since the extra contacts are all in the back so a cable that is not quite in all the way will get stuck at usb 2.0 speeds.

Funny thing is I have a USB 3 drive enclosure and even on USB 2.0 it never tells me it can perform faster.

It may not hurt to check the rosewill site just to ensure you are running the latest firmware and drivers. Many times the CD drivers are outdated(Like with Creative sound cards....).

http://www.rosewill.com/Support/SearchResult.aspx?p=RC-505

Once you get all this solved, you may wish to google for daniel K audigy drivers. They add some extra features the Audigy 2zs lost when going from Windows XP to Vista/7. I found them to be very useful to me(CMSS options mostly).

 

[Sicel1304]

My bad about the card, just saw the cable.

Please make sure the cable is pushed all the way in. this is important on the card side since the extra contacts are all in the back so a cable that is not quite in all the way will get stuck at usb 2.0 speeds.

Funny thing is I have a USB 3 drive enclosure and even on USB 2.0 it never tells me it can perform faster.

It may not hurt to check the rosewill site just to ensure you are running the latest firmware and drivers. Many times the CD drivers are outdated(Like with Creative sound cards....).

http://www.rosewill.com/Support/SearchResult.aspx?p=RC-505

Once you get all this solved, you may wish to google for daniel K audigy drivers. They add some extra features the Audigy 2zs lost when going from Windows XP to Vista/7. I found them to be very useful to me(CMSS options mostly).

Funny thing about the CD drivers from the Rosewill site. I tried to install both of those about a week or so back, but something weird happened; The driver for the RC-505 (the 6.7 mb file) worked fine, but when I tried to download the driver and firmware for RC-505 (the 10.0 mb file), the download stopped about 60% of the way through and wouldn't budge. I'll try it again to see if it works though.

 

[nukemaster]

I downloaded it to see if they actually had a firmware in it(they have a firmware and a driver in the package). it should work.

 

[Sicel1304]

I downloaded it to see if they actually had a firmware in it(they have a firmware and a driver in the package). it should work.

Stupid question; after I download the driver and firmware zip file, where do I extract it to?

 

[nukemaster]

You can just extract them in the download folder then run them. They do not even need to be kept after you are done, but the driver may be worth hanging on to.

The firmware update first(uPD720200_uPD720200A_FW_Updater.exe). Disconnect all devices from the USB 3 ports before doing this.

DO NOT POWER OFF WHILE THE FIRMWARE IS BEING UPDATED. <- sorry for the all caps, but with any firmware/bios update, you never want to power off until it is done its thing

If asked to restart AFTER the firmware update, do it.

Once that is done, install the drivers(RENESAS-USB3-Host-Driver-21250-setup.exe).

 

[Sicel1304]

You can just extract them in the download folder then run them. They do not even need to be kept after you are done, but the driver may be worth hanging on to.

The firmware update first(uPD720200_uPD720200A_FW_Updater.exe). Disconnect all devices from the USB 3 ports before doing this.

DO NOT POWER OFF WHILE THE FIRMWARE IS BEING UPDATED. <- sorry for the all caps, but with any firmware/bios update, you never want to power off until it is done its thing

If asked to restart AFTER the firmware update, do it.

Once that is done, install the drivers(RENESAS-USB3-Host-Driver-21250-setup.exe).

The firmware update is running as we speak. It just seems to be taking a lot longer then I thought it would.

When I tried running the firmware update a week ago, I did do a force-shutdown on my computer because I thought the process had frozen halfway through. I hope it didn't cause any permanent damage.

 

[nukemaster]

Fingers crossed. A failed firmware on a video card of dvd burner results in a device that does not even work any more.

With a video card there are some tricks to get it working again.

 

[Sicel1304]

Fingers crossed. A failed firmware on a video card of dvd burner results in a device that does not even work any more.

With a video card there are some tricks to get it working again.

Hey Nuke,

So after letting the firmware update go on for about 20-30 minutes, this message popped up; "Not found the host controller. Please insert the USB 3.0 host controller and launch the firmware update again!"

I'm confused at this point. I installed the host driver file, then I tried to install the firmware update only to get that "Not found the host controller" message. Any idea as to what is going on?

 

[nukemaster]

That is strange, maybe you already had the correct version.

Did the drivers help any?

 

[Sicel1304]

That is strange, maybe you already had the correct version.

Did the drivers help any?

I don't think so. There were some drivers on the external HD that I just tried installing in hopes that that may produce a change, but we'll see. I'm at a loss as to what the problem may be.

 

[nukemaster]

How does the drive run on the normal USB 2.0 ports? I mean even usb 2 is good fora bit more then 10-20megabyte/sec

 

[Sicel1304]

How does the drive run on the normal USB 2.0 ports? I mean even usb 2 is good fora bit more then 10-20megabyte/sec

The speed would still fluctuate between 10 - 20 mb per sec depending on what type of file was being transferred, so maybe the root of the problem here is something else entirely. Do you know of any programs that test USB speeds?

 

[nukemaster]

Standard hard drive benchmarks test usb hard drives as well.

Remember that smaller 2.5 inch drive tend to operate slower.

try hdtune(free) not hdtune pro

http://www.hdtune.com/download.html

 

[Sicel1304]

Standard hard drive benchmarks test usb hard drives as well.

Remember that smaller 2.5 inch drive tend to operate slower.

try hdtune(free) not hdtune pro

http://www.hdtune.com/download.html

The average write time on the 160 gb drive was 40.0 mb/sec, average write time on the external 500 gb drive was 75.3 mb/sec, and the avg. write time on the 36 gb raptor drive was 37.2 mb/sec.

By the way, the 36 gb raptor drive is my OS drive, the 160 gb drive serves as my storage drive, and the external 500 gb drive is my backup.

Is it possible that the write/read times are bad because I've never reformatted the storage drive?

 

[nukemaster]

In general(not formatting), no. that should not cause it.

Older drives tend to run slower since the amount of data per platter was less.

A modern drive will push past 100megabyte/sec. For example, a 2 terabyte seagate(green, so not a top end drive) will average 102.5 megabyte/second

We do start to run into a potential problem here, If your drives are fragmented, transfers will be slower because the drive head has to move all over to get all the bits of data.

Smaller files also transfer slower because each file is located in a different location on the disk(again, the drive head has allot of moving to do to get from file to file).

If you are getting 75.3 megabytes/ second from your external, your usb 3.0 port is working just fine. This puts the bottleneck back on the system it self(or most so the drives).

On average, i think the raptor should be pushing closer to a 45-55 average(being the windows drive may cause false results since if windows tries to access the drive while testing, it will slow down). What the raptor shines in is access times. So it can jump from place to place faster. This means over lots of small files(like those loaded with windows from all over the drive)will be faster.

I just want to confirm that your board has the latest drivers installed(chipset)?

 

[Sicel1304]

In general(not formatting), no. that should not cause it.

Older drives tend to run slower since the amount of data per platter was less.

A modern drive will push past 100megabyte/sec. For example, a 2 terabyte seagate(green, so not a top end drive) will average 102.5 megabyte/second

We do start to run into a potential problem here, If your drives are fragmented, transfers will be slower because the drive head has to move all over to get all the bits of data.

Smaller files also transfer slower because each file is located in a different location on the disk(again, the drive head has allot of moving to do to get from file to file).

If you are getting 75.3 megabytes/ second from your external, your usb 3.0 port is working just fine. This puts the bottleneck back on the system it self(or most so the drives).

On average, i think the raptor should be pushing closer to a 45-55 average(being the windows drive may cause false results since if windows tries to access the drive while testing, it will slow down). What the raptor shines in is access times. So it can jump from place to place faster. This means over lots of small files(like those loaded with windows from all over the drive)will be faster.

I just want to confirm that your board has the latest drivers installed(chipset)?

I'm fairly certain that my motherboard has the latest drivers installed. When I was trying to troubleshoot the USB 3.0 problem myself, one of the recommendations was to make sure you had the latest drivers for your motherboard.

I've defragmented my storage drive at least 4-5 times over the years, which would explain why the transfer speed between that drive and my external wasn't the best. Also, the overwhelming majority of the files that I transferred were fairly small in size (they were mostly songs, pictures, word documents, and power point presentations) which also would explain the slow transfer speed. I just didn't think that they would be low as in the 10-20 mb range.

 

[nukemaster]

Well i know i do not always push files from drive to drive at the full speed of both drives.

I am almost willing to bet, you are just stuck with the small files transferring slower.

I will do some usb 2.0 mp3 transfers and see what i get(its usb2 or esata). But please note my internal and external drive are both rather new(and identical too).

EDIT

how are your drive to drive transfers?

I just did a drive to drive and the lowest speed was 70megabytes/sec, but for the most part it stayed near 100(like I say, new drives.).

Will post back with usb transfers

about 20 for mp3
15-20 for random files.

 

[Sicel1304]

Well i know i do not always push files from drive to drive at the full speed of both drives.

I am almost willing to bet, you are just stuck with the small files transferring slower.

I will do some usb 2.0 mp3 transfers and see what i get(its usb2 or esata). But please note my internal and external drive are both rather new(and identical too).

EDIT

how are your drive to drive transfers?

I just did a drive to drive and the lowest speed was 70megabytes/sec, but for the most part it stayed near 100(like I say, new drives.).

Will post back with usb transfers

about 20 for mp3
15-20 for random files.

I used a small file (424 mb) and copied it from one drive to the other, and overall the speed rate was around 40 mb/sec. So I would agree with you and say that I probably won't see much of a speed increase until I find the need to transfer bigger files. Is that correct?

 

[nukemaster]

yes.

With the drives all de-fragmented, it should improve somewhat.

You may wish to try this program. It is faster then Windows own and its free.

http://www.piriform.com/defraggler

Next time you get a new hard drive, you will be blown away

 

[sperazza]

all, i found this same issue. usb drivers were up to date on the pci card, but was still seeing issues.

it turns out the usb (key fob) drive itself needed driver updates, searched for the manufacturer of keyfob, installed updates to drive. issue solved. it was also helpful to use sisoft to see real speeds on usb3 drives.

 

[sperazza]

also, formatting the usb drive to ntfs improved speed drastically on win 7 also.