USB 3.0 slow transfer speeds @ 5-7MB/s on Hard Drive #1 but faster and 100+MB/s on another

[supermanu15]

I just recently bought an ASUS B85M-G and have these following Drives:
- 1 Transcend 240GB SSD
- 1 Seagate Barracuda 500GB HDD
- 1 HGST 1TB HDD

What's weird is when I have my USB 3.0 External HDD transferring a 60+GB file over to the HGST HDD the transfer speed is so poor (5-7MB/s), so I tested it out and transferred it to my SSD, the transfer is less than 20MB/s but when I transferred the file over to the Seagate Barracuda 500GB file the transfer is a whopping 105-106MB/s.

Note:
1. Its a fresh install, so everything is clean, no clutter at all.
2. Made sure that it was plugged into the SATA 3(6GB/s) slot
3. Brought the external HDD to my office PC and confirmed the same whopping speed

Thanks in advance for your inputs!

 

[Adrian Ocampo]

At what rpm is your 1TB hdd vs your 500gb?

 

[supermanu15]

The HGST is @ 5400 RPM though, how much of a difference should we be seeing here?

 

[Solandri]

5400 RPM vs 7200 RPM is only a 33% speed difference. Generally, the modernness of the drive makes a bigger difference. Newer drives have a higher areal density (more GB per square cm of platter), so more data passes under the read/write heads per rotation even at the same RPM. A new drive vs. a 8 year old drive will probably have about a 200%-300% difference in speed due to difference in areal density.

But given the numbers you've presented, my initial guess would be that the HGST HDD needs to be defragmented.

The SSD transfer is probably slow because it doesn't have enough erased cells to store 60 GB, so is having to erase them as it's writing data. SSDs cannot overwrite existing data with new data. The cells with data need to be erased first before they can store new data. The erase step on a SSD is very slow, and is normally done in the background when the SSD is not being used. But because SSDs don't entirely understand filesystems, some sectors cannot be erased until the OS tells it to write new data to that sector (this is what TRIM was for). Try copying a smaller file (say around 2 GB, assuming you have 60+ GB free) to the SSD and see what speeds you get.

 

[supermanu15]

Try copying a smaller file (say around 2 GB, assuming you have 60+ GB free) to the SSD and see what speeds you get.

Will do once i get home, driver/chipset issue can be ruled out since it is working fine on the other drive, but again this is a clean install, nothing on all the drives so the erase operation shoudlnt be an issue

 

[D_Know_WD]

Hi there supermanu15,

I believe it would be a nice start to just test all your drives with some of these: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/282651-32-best-diagnostic-testing-utility
If there's something wrong with any of those, just back up the data stored.

In case the drives are fine, you can go to your MOBO's website and update its drivers.
Also, you can switch the places of the internal HDDs and see if that would make any difference.

Cheers,
D_Know_WD

 

[supermanu15]

Update:

The drivers for the motherboard have been updated, installed all Windows Updates on both Win10 and Win7, still the same thing, from my external to the following drives are as follows:

- SSD 240GB = less than 30MB/s
- Seagate 500GB HDD = 106MB/s
- HGST 1TB HDD = 7-8MB/s

 

[supermanu15]

Hi there supermanu15,

I believe it would be a nice start to just test all your drives with some of these: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/282651-32-best-diagnostic-testing-utility
If there's something wrong with any of those, just back up the data stored.

In case the drives are fine, you can go to your MOBO's website and update its drivers.
Also, you can switch the places of the internal HDDs and see if that would make any difference.

Cheers,
D_Know_WD

I forgot to do this last night, will do this later tonight ugh