Slow speed tranfer on WD Passport 0740?

[Sybnios]

I have my new PC built up and running all drivers installed for a week now everything works really smooth but I have been stuck on one thing. My external hard drive. That is WD My Passport 0740 USB 3.0

I was doing some copy files testing and noticed that I get speeds from 40 MB/s to 80 MB/s. I have tried copying an iso file 4.3 GB from my usb drive to my samsung pro 850 and I got from 60 to 70 MB/s

Then I tried an even bigger set of rars 44GB and got 40 MB/s..

I even downloaded AI Suite to see if the USB 3.0 boost will do anything. Which it didn't.

Is this normal? Aren't these quite slow speeds especially for the big size 44GB for a USB 3.0??

PC Specs:

CPU: Intel Core i7-4790k 4.0 Ghz
M/B: Asus MAXIMUS VII HERO
RAM: Corsair Vengeance 16GB DDR3-1866
Hard Disk: Samsung 850 Pro Series 256GB SSD
GPU: MSI GeForce GTX 970 4GB Gaming
Case: Cooler Master Storm Stryker
PSU: SeaSonic Platinum 860W 80+ Platinum Certified
Optical Drive: LG WH14NS40 Blu-Ray/DVD/CD Writer

 

[bigpinkdragon286]

While the external hard drive you purchased may say USB 3.0 on the box, that's really just the interface type of the device which you purchased. Internally, there is a spinning platter magnetic hard disk drive like you would find in any recent model computer. From one end of the drive to the other, speed will vary, as obviously the magnetic media travelling beneath the read / write heads of the drive will be moving at different rates based on whether the read / write heads are near the spindle in the center of the drive or the outer sectors of the disk.

There are various things that can effect your transfer speeds such as, other tasks being performed on the same PC. USB tends to be a master and slave setup so, if the host machine is heavily burdened doing other things, expect the USB transfer speeds to decrease. Also, you can't send information to your new drive any faster than you are queuing it up. You may want to have a look at the speed at which you're gathering the data you are sending to the external disk, say perhaps from an internal drive, or from an internet based download. Also, you will want to ensure the drive is plugged into a USB 3 or newer USB port on your computer, rather than USB 2 or older.

In general however, if you compare the norms for hard drives, anywhere between 40 MB/s - 150 MB/s are not unheard of. You can expect there to be a little bit of overhead involved because you're using a USB interface, but likely there is absolutely nothing wrong, and everything is running just fine.

 

[Sybnios]

While the external hard drive you purchased may say USB 3.0 on the box, that's really just the interface type of the device which you purchased. Internally, there is a spinning platter magnetic hard disk drive like you would find in any recent model computer. From one end of the drive to the other, speed will vary, as obviously the magnetic media travelling beneath the read / write heads of the drive will be moving at different rates based on whether the read / write heads are near the spindle in the center of the drive or the outer sectors of the disk.

There are various things that can effect your transfer speeds such as, other tasks being performed on the same PC. USB tends to be a master and slave setup so, if the host machine is heavily burdened doing other things, expect the USB transfer speeds to decrease. Also, you can't send information to your new drive any faster than you are queuing it up. You may want to have a look at the speed at which you're gathering the data you are sending to the external disk, say perhaps from an internal drive, or from an internet based download. Also, you will want to ensure the drive is plugged into a USB 3 or newer USB port on your computer, rather than USB 2 or older.

In general however, if you compare the norms for hard drives, anywhere between 40 MB/s - 150 MB/s are not unheard of. You can expect there to be a little bit of overhead involved because you're using a USB interface, but likely there is absolutely nothing wrong, and everything is running just fine.

Thanks for the explanation. I was hoping as you said a speed around the 150 MB/s area. In all the copying I am doing I have everything closed its just one window of windows explorer open. Nothing extra running in the background. I did the tests even on a cold boot. I understand everything you explained to me except the following part:

"Also, you can't send information to your new drive any faster than you are queuing it up. You may want to have a look at the speed at which you're gathering the data you are sending to the external disk, say perhaps from an internal drive, or from an internet based download."

What exactly do you mean by the first sentence? The copy happens from my WD Passport to the SSD and vice versa. Sorry my native language is not English and sometimes I miss the meaning.. like now

 

[bigpinkdragon286]

To try and better explain what I meant about queuing up data...

Before you can transfer data to your WD Passport external drive, the DATA has to be present in some fashion inside of the computer. To do this, the computer queues up the DATA. It means, the computer reads data from the source and transfers it to memory, so it can be sent through the external transport to your external disk. Even if your external drive could accept data at an infinite speed, you would still have only a limited speed for the data being sent to it, because the data has to come from somewhere, and pass through certain other components in the computer, all of which have an effect on the total throughput. In this case, it sounds like the data is coming from an SSD, so the first thing I would suspect is, the source of the data (SSD) is faster than the destination (external drive.) The transport being DMA and USB is also going to be faster than your external drive, so what it looks like is the external drive is the slowest device in your chain of devices being used when you transfer files to it.

Conversely, when you copy from your external drive back to your SSD, your external drive is still the slowest device during the transfer, so again is setting the speed at which the whole operation takes place.

I know it's nice to hope for 150 MB/s transfer rates, but it's not something I would expect, especially on an external hard drive. Manufacturers usually stick slower drives in external enclosures to save money, keep energy consumption / heat down, and they probably figure that not too many users are going to realize the disk in the enclosure is not one of their better units, since few people open them up and actually look at the internal disk that's been used. Also, as I was saying, even if you get 150 MB/s on the high side, you might be getting 125 - 130 MB/s as the head moves toward the inner sectors of the disk. The transfer rate is not going to be consistently fast across the entire storage capacity of the disk.

You can certainly buy faster external drives, but I wouldn't spend the money personally unless that extra time spent transferring files was actually costing me money or some other tangible thing. It's too easy for me to go and do other tasks while files are transferring for me to spend the money it would take to improve it by a few percentage points.

 

[Sybnios]

To try and better explain what I meant about queuing up data...

Before you can transfer data to your WD Passport external drive, the DATA has to be present in some fashion inside of the computer. To do this, the computer queues up the DATA. It means, the computer reads data from the source and transfers it to memory, so it can be sent through the external transport to your external disk. Even if your external drive could accept data at an infinite speed, you would still have only a limited speed for the data being sent to it, because the data has to come from somewhere, and pass through certain other components in the computer, all of which have an effect on the total throughput. In this case, it sounds like the data is coming from an SSD, so the first thing I would suspect is, the source of the data (SSD) is faster than the destination (external drive.) The transport being DMA and USB is also going to be faster than your external drive, so what it looks like is the external drive is the slowest device in your chain of devices being used when you transfer files to it.

Conversely, when you copy from your external drive back to your SSD, your external drive is still the slowest device during the transfer, so again is setting the speed at which the whole operation takes place.

I know it's nice to hope for 150 MB/s transfer rates, but it's not something I would expect, especially on an external hard drive. Manufacturers usually stick slower drives in external enclosures to save money, keep energy consumption / heat down, and they probably figure that not too many users are going to realize the disk in the enclosure is not one of their better units, since few people open them up and actually look at the internal disk that's been used. Also, as I was saying, even if you get 150 MB/s on the high side, you might be getting 125 - 130 MB/s as the head moves toward the inner sectors of the disk. The transfer rate is not going to be consistently fast across the entire storage capacity of the disk.

You can certainly buy faster external drives, but I wouldn't spend the money personally unless that extra time spent transferring files was actually costing me money or some other tangible thing. It's too easy for me to go and do other tasks while files are transferring for me to spend the money it would take to improve it by a few percentage points.

Thanks a lot for the time you spent writing this excellent and educational explanation. I will save money and buy another internal SSD instead than trying to find the best external drive that in the end won't provide me the leap in speed I was hoping for.