USB 3.0, is it down to the port or hdd?

[davidmiller179]

Hi, I'm not very good with this stuff but need help please.
I have an old Sony Viao laptop with water damage & I have taken the hdd (750gb) out to use on my Xbox one, I have a usb 3.0 enclosure but my Xbox is saying its to slow to store games on. Does this mean my hdd is only compatible with usb 2.0? Is usb 3.0 something to with the hdd or just the usb port?
Many thanks.

 

[morgancomputers]

Double check the enclosure some 'USB 3.0' caddy's are in fact only SATA II not SATA III so that will bottleneck the HDD. Secondly check the actual HDD if its an older 5200rpm SATA II Drive then you will not get great perfprmance even in a fully rated SATA III USB 3.0 enclosure.

I hope that makes sense...

 

[Solandri]

A HDD that came from a laptop will have a SATA interface. The enclosure translates from SATA to USB, so any SATA HDD will work in any USB enclosure. That is, any USB 2 or 3 limitation is imposed by the enclosure, not the HDD. SATA 2 or SATA 3 doesn't really matter for laptop HDDs since SATA 2 already exceeds the max speed of most laptop HDDs.

I can think of several possible reasons for the message. It really boils down to why exactly the Xbox is giving the message. I wasn't able to find any suggestions online for exactly what specs the Xbox looks for in making this determination (aside from USB 2.0 definitely causing it).

• 
  ■The enclosure is actually USB 2.0. As much as it sucks, when USB 3.0 first came out, a lot of device manufacturers advertised their USB 2.0 devices as "USB 3.0 compatible" (never mentioning USB 2.0) to trick people into thinking the devices were USB 3.0. This was especially rampant on Amazon.
  ■The enclosure is malfunctioning, and is connecting at USB 2.0 speeds.
  ■The HDD is badly fragmented (files written in little pieces scattered all around). HDDs are notoriously slow when files are fragmented, and fragmentation forces new files to be written as fragments. Try plugging the HDD into a PC and run a defragmenter on it
  https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4026701/windows-defragment-your-windows-10-pc
  ■The HDD is dying. One of the symptoms of a dying drive can be that it experiences read errors, forcing it to re-read data over and over until it finally gets a clean read (there's a checksum written with each data chunk, which it can use to confirm the data was most likely read properly). Try plugging the HDD into a PC and run CrystalDiskInfo to read its SMART stats. These are a set of internal measurements the HDD maintains which can flag a potentially dying drive before it dies to the point of data loss.
  https://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskinfo/
  ■The HDD is becoming full. Data is written at the same density over the entire surface of the platter. So this means the outer tracks (roughly 2x longer than the inner tracks) hold roughly 2x as much data as the inner tracks. Since the rotation speed is the same for both inner and outer tracks, the max data read/write speeds are roughly 2x higher for outer tracks as they are for inner tracks. HDDs know this, so begin writing data to the outer tracks first. As they fill up, they are forced to use the slower inner tracks. If the drive used to work before but doesn't anymore, and the SMART check comes out healthy, then this is a possible reason.
  ■The HDD is just too old and slow. Older drives had lower areal density, so fewer bits were written on each track. This affects the amount of data the drive can read per rotation, which since the rotational speed is fixed translates into a certain max MB/s speed. Newer laptop drives are around 150-180 MB/s. But older SATA drives could be as slow as 60-80 MB/s. Especially for laptop drives, some of which were even 4800 or 3600 RPM (vs the standard 5400 or 7200 RPM).
  ■Also, although the HDD's speed with large files depends on areal density x RPM, its speed with small files depends only on RPM. So HDDs are notoriously slow with small files. Below 1 MB/s for most laptop HDDs. 0.2-0.3 MB/s being possible for the 3600 and 4800 RPM drives. The Xbox may judge this to be too slow. There's nothing you can do about this except get a new drive, preferably a SSD (which typically hit 30-50 MB/s small file speeds - a hundred times faster).

 

[davidmiller179]

Hi guys, thanks for the reply, I appreciate it. I'm not sure what I done but it seems to be working on my Xbox now. Thanks again.