Question Any way to increase transfer speed between drives?

[exmotech]

I have a rather new setup.

1. DELL Inspiron i7, 16GB RAM, 512SSD and 1TB HDD.
2. Two external drives: Seagate Skyhawk 4TB, Seagate Terascale 4TB
3. Windows 10.

The external drives are obviously with SATA 6GB/s interface. They are connected to the laptop through an Insignia USB 3.0 docking station.

The problem is that I work on my laptop with large files (video files and RAW camera files) so making backup or transfers as high as 1TB and over are not something rare. What I am getting is very inconsistent transfer speeds and I would like to find a solution to it. The drives can go as low as 2-11MB per second, to an average of 30MB per second. The speed jumps up and down and the result is transferring 500GB of data for 4-5 hours. Transferring files between two drives in the docking station is almost impossible for unknown reason. I need to transfer to the laptop and then to the drive again, which makes it a total of 8 hours and the drives get hot which worries me as these are backup drivs which are supposed to be taken care of.

Where the hell is the USB 3.0 ultra-super-duper speed gone? Why do drives have 6GB/S interfaces when the transfer speeds are like 15 years ago?

Is there any software trick I can try to improve this before I spend money on another docking station, and then another docking station and another one? I have turned off drive indexing but not noticeable change. What else can I turn on or off to finally get decent transfer speeds?

HELP :-(

 

[ex_bubblehead]

Nothing you can do about this. Once the cache on the drive/s fills (which will happen quite rapidly) the transfer rate will be reduced to that of the spinning platters in the drive/s. You cannot speed this up.

 

[jsmithepa]

U gotta be careful with these docking stations. They can advertise USB3 ports when in reality they are saying this device will connect and work with your laptop USB3 port but they never promised you USB3 speed.

How do you ensure... not the foggies idea, I don't use USB3 ext drives.

 

[exmotech]

I had a 'normal' desktop tower PC and all my drives were connected to the motherboard via SATA cables. I moved to another place and simply had to buy a laptop due to lack of space and frequent travel. I was hoping that USB 3.0 would be equally good or better (it looks better on paper) but unfortunately that's not the case.

Oh and I still don't know how to explain the fact that one drive has reading speeds as low as 2MB/s. That's sick. My second drive ranges closer to 50MB/s but the other one has a spread from 70 to 2MB/s. Let's hope it's not a sign of death coming soon.

 

[Karadjgne]

There's multiple reviews stating either not recognised or works great with one drive but 2 drives is quirky or lowered performance. That's if it's the same insignia 2 bay dock I just read. Do you get same results if you swap bays? It maybe you just got a lemon and I'd take it back to bestbuy and swap it out for new.

 

[Solandri]

The problem is that I work on my laptop with large files (video files and RAW camera files) so making backup or transfers as high as 1TB and over are not something rare. What I am getting is very inconsistent transfer speeds and I would like to find a solution to it. The drives can go as low as 2-11MB per second, to an average of 30MB per second. The speed jumps up and down and the result is transferring 500GB of data for 4-5 hours.

That's normal for platter drives. Their small file read/write speeds can be as low as 1-1.5 MB/s. 30 MB/s is a bit low for a mix of files, especially if most of them are large video files. But it's within the range of speeds I've seen for mixed files on platter drives. If all the files are large video files, you should actually be seeing higher average speeds. But not if the files are fragmented. Once they become fragmented, even the large files behave like small files on a platter drive.

This is why most people working seriously with video will invest in large external SSDs for transferring files. Their small file speeds aren't stellar either (about 30-100 MB/s). But their advantage is that files can't become fragmented on them. So if all your files are large video files, they will always transfer at sequential speeds. Which on USB 3.0 SSDs would be about 500 MB/s (~17 minutes for 500 GB of large files). If you can put multiple SSDs in a thunderbolt RAID-0 enclosure, you can hit even higher sequential speeds. Provided your internal SSD is fast enough to keep up of course.