USB 3 transfers are extremely slow

[TheArtOfWar]

TLDR; USB3 is slow averaging 4Mb/s write when vendor claims a mean 12Mb/s write speed - drivers were updated but there was no improvement. Also, which portable USB SSD is a good compromise between performance and cost?

TDK TF30 64Gb
ASUS Z87PRO
Western Digital Blue 1Tb HDD


Good afternoon,

I recently bought a 64Gb TDK USB 3.0 thumbstick to backup my music library onto so I can move it between my Mac and desktop. There is one problem in that to copy the files from my desktop to my drive (22Gb) it takes around 2h; I looked up online for solutions and it came up that it may be an outdated driver problem.
I headed to the ASUS Z87 Pro driver downloads, downloaded the latest USB3 drivers and installed them. I restarted my PC and tried again to copy my library twice; these drivers seem to have had no effect if not even making the write speed worse.
Could it be a faulty thumbstick? Various sources indicate a read speed of 56Mb/s and a write speed of 12Mb/s and I was barely getting 4Mb/s write.
Is it maybe because I am migrating many small files as opposed to one whole big one? Would zipping the library and transferring result in a better rate of migration?

Thanks in advance,
Angelo

 

[Mattios]

The speeds should be higher than that yes. You're certainly using a USB 3.0 port? Can you try a different PC's port?

If it works at high speeds on another PC, problem = first PC
If it doesn't work at high speeds on another PC, problem = USB

 

[TwoDigital]

One large file will definitely transfer much faster than a lot of small ones. I've found having lots of small files KILLS your thumbdrive transfer speed. I have no benchmarks to back that up, but I know on a great day none of my thumb drives break 8MB/s... though many claim they'll do 10 or even 16. They just don't real-world...

You're probably far better off with a USB3 external drive - even if it's just a 2.5" HDD. You can pick those things up now for $50-$80 for a decent 1Tb model. The SSD is even faster, but at about 4x+ the price for like-capacity HDD.

 

[TheArtOfWar]

The speeds should be higher than that yes. You're certainly using a USB 3.0 port? Can you try a different PC's port?

If it works at high speeds on another PC, problem = first PC
If it doesn't work at high speeds on another PC, problem = USB

It's what I thought Mattios.. The speeds are lackluster. I'll try switching ports (at least 1 in 8 must work

 

[TheArtOfWar]

For future users with a similar problem:

It's not my computer's problem since my MacBook with similar specs took a similar amount of time to complete the tasks. Instead, zipping the files into larger chunks seems to have helped resolving the problem.
However, I had to format the drive into NTFS as opposed to FAT32 or exFAT in order to transfer ZIP archives bigger than 4Gb in one go to the drive; Mac OSX can only read (and copy) the files to its drive but cannot write in NTFS (whereas it can in exFAT and FAT32).
I also decided to use the largest allocation unit size to try speed up the copying of the files from PC to USB drive but I am not sure if it helped.

 

[Mattios]

FAT32 has a file size limit of 4 Gb - this is over all devices not just yours. NTFS has no (easy to reach) size limit, and is used more than FAT32.

Large files will also always copy faster than many smaller ones - I should have mentioned this in my first answer.

 

[TheArtOfWar]

FAT32 has a file size limit of 4 Gb - this is over all devices not just yours. NTFS has no (easy to reach) size limit, and is used more than FAT32.

Large files will also always copy faster than many smaller ones - I should have mentioned this in my first answer.

The problem with NTFS is that Mac can't write to it.. Unless you use a third party software