Question WD Elements 5TB portable HDD very slow transfer speeds ?

[peter762033]

Hi,

I've just bought a new WD Elements 5TB portable HDD and the transfer speeds are painfully slow. I've been backing up files and am getting average speeds of around 30mbps and the advertised transfer speed is 130mbps.
Does anyone know what could be causing this?

Thanks,
Pete

 

[Rokinamerica]

What are you transferring from? The slowest part of the equation will be the fastest it will go. I am not familiar with the external drive but your specs would help lot to try to figure out what is the issue.

 

[peter762033]

What are you transferring from? The slowest part of the equation will be the fastest it will go. I am not familiar with the external drive but your specs would help lot to try to figure out what is the issue.

Thanks for your reply, the specs are as follows:

Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4700MQ CPU @ 2.40GHz 2.40 GHz
16bg ram
1tb HDD

 

[Rokinamerica]

The speed of the HDD will be what limits your transfers.

No matter what you use, you will never get faster speeds than what your HDD can do if that is what you are reading from or writing to. The slowest part of the equation will always be your fastest speed achievable.

 

[peter762033]

The speed of the HDD will be what limits your transfers.

No matter what you use, you will never get faster speeds than what your HDD can do if that is what you are reading from or writing to. The slowest part of the equation will always be your fastest speed achievable.

Can you recommend any software that will be able to test the speeds of my hard drive?

Thanks for your help,
Pete

 

[USAFRet]

Performance is dictated by the slowest device in the chain.

The USB connection?
The composition of the data? 10,000 small files comprising 1TB WILL transfer much slower than 2 files of 500GB each, totaling 1TB.

 

[Grobe]

Can you recommend any software that will be able to test the speeds of my hard drive?

I don't have a direct answer, but your drive may be of SMR type, and you need the stress test software to be able to run test on random writes. It doesn't matter very much what rating of sequential read speed when you're talking SMR drives.