New External drive for PS4 is slow

Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
M

mariowarrior777

Distinguished
Jul 10, 2011
6
0
18,510
I bought a Seagate expansion 4tb portable external drive for my PS4 pro. I was expecting 100 MB per second but I'm getting about 45 MB when moving games from system storage to extended storage. Also, game loading times are 5% to 25% slower on the external drive. I bought the drive to expand my storage and also to get marginally better transfer speeds and loading speeds. My external hard drive is brand new and it was made in Thailand instead of China if that makes any difference. The drive works fine but it's a bit slow. Any idea why this is happening?
 
Sort by date Sort by votes
Upvote 0 Downvote
45 MB/s isn't unusual for an HDD, depending on what sort of files are being transferred. External HDDs tend to be slower than internal ones. Don't really see anything that's obviously wrong here. What exactly made you expect 100 MB/s? If that's what the drive is advertised as, those values are always absolute best case scenarios, with real world use typically being a fair bit less (again, depending on what exactly you're transferring).
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
TJ Hooker said:
45 MB/s isn't unusual for an HDD, depending on what sort of files are being transferred. External HDDs tend to be slower than internal ones. Don't really see anything that's obviously wrong here. What exactly made you expect 100 MB/s? If that's what the drive is advertised as, those values are always absolute best case scenarios, with real world use typically being a fair bit less (again, depending on what exactly you're transferring).
Click to expand...

Well, taking into a account that an external hard drive is a normal hard drive put into an enclosure with a sata to USB 3.0 port adapter, I do worry about such slow speeds. You must be aware of the fact that people are taking hard drives out of their enclosure and putting them into their PS4s and PCs because they are cheaper but perform the same as internal hard drives.

In terms of what made me think I would get 100 MB/s, I always do research before I buy something and I found some indicators that I would get about 100 MB/s.

First, there were about 3 benchmarks that indicated max writing and reading speeds of about 130 Mb/s.

Second, other similar external hard drives in a similar price point, for example WD my passport were tested and got 90 MB/s max read and write speeds.

Third, I timed how long it took for some youtubers to transfer games from internal drive to extended storage in their PS4s and my approximate results were 100 MB/s.

Fourth, digital foundry did some tests with the exact same drive that I have and got faster loading times when compared with the stock internal drive.

Last but not least, common sense, I have had several PCs over the years and 45 MB/s from a hard drive is like the performance we got in 2005.

In conclusion, 45 MB/s from a USB 3.0 External hard drive is completely unacceptable for me in 2019, taking into account that some other people can get better results with the exact same drive I have and also similar ones,
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Can external drives have the same specs as internal ones? Sure. But they often don't. For instance, most external ones are 5400 RPM, whereas 3.5" drives are often 7200 RPM (although at higher capacities like 4TB a lot of them are also 5400 RPM). Also, from what I can find most Seagate expansion drives use SMR technology, which is generally inferior in terms of performance to the PMR technology used in typical 3.5" drives. The Expansion drive might also have smaller cache than a typical 4TB 3.5" drive, although I don't know because manufacturers deliberately don't post proper specs/info for external drives (which I think is pretty questionable in itself).

I'm guessing those max read/write speeds are for sequential transfers. Sequential benchmark results always look impressive but often don't translate well into real world use. Show me some benchmarks where that HDD (or any similar HDD) gets sustained 100 MB/s for random/mixed I/O.

You can find just about anything on youtube. Did they have the exact same drive as you (both internal and external)? Was everything else about their setup the same as yours? Were they copying the same games?

Can you link the digital foundry video?

I don't know what sort of file system the PS4 uses, but can you just connect the Expansion to a desktop/laptop and copy the exact same files to/from the drive and see how they compare to the speeds you get from you PS4? Could also try coping a single large file (like a video) to see how that performs. Although all of these results will also depend on the other drive you're copying to/from, so if at all possible try to have the secondary drive be an SSD.
 
Last edited:
Upvote 0 Downvote
TJ Hooker said:
Can external drives have the same specs as internal ones? Sure. But they often don't. For instance, most external ones are 5400 RPM, whereas 3.5" drives are often 7200 RPM (although at higher capacities like 4TB a lot of them are also 5400 RPM). Also, from what I can find most Seagate expansion drives use SMR technology, which is generally inferior in terms of performance to the PMR technology used in typical 3.5" drives. The Expansion drive might also have smaller cache than a typical 4TB 3.5" drive, although I don't know because manufacturers deliberately don't post proper specs/info for external drives (which I think is pretty questionable in itself).

I'm guessing those max read/write speeds are for sequential transfers. Sequential benchmark results always look impressive but often don't translate well into real world use. Show me some benchmarks where that HDD (or any similar HDD) gets sustained 100 MB/s for random/mixed I/O.

You can find just about anything on youtube. Did they have the exact same drive as you (both internal and external)? Was everything else about their setup the same as yours? Were they copying the same games?

Can you link the digital foundry video?

I don't know what sort of file system the PS4 uses, but can you just connect the Expansion to a desktop/laptop and copy the exact same files to/from the drive and see how they compare to the speeds you get from you PS4? Could also try coping a single large file (like a video) to see how that performs. Although all of these results will also depend on the other drive you're copying to/from, so if at all possible try to have the secondary drive be an SSD.
Click to expand...

The research I did took me like 2 days and I didn't think I would need to keep track of the websites I visited. I'm not planning to do it all over again so I'm quoting the digital foundry video which should be the most accurate gone in terms of load speeds. I am also quoting a random speed test.

Digital foundry video
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HuIaHxil_w


Speed test

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctE_CUIKnG8
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom