External HD performance question

[0v3rloader]

Hello,

I have just bought a Seagate USB2.0 250GB external drive [

http://www.seagate.com/products/retail/external/usb

] and, upon receiving it, I immediately conducted a few benchmark tests.

Least to say, I was not surprised with the results. I got an average of 30MB/s, while Seagate advertises a whopping 60MB/s data transfer rate (USB2.0 maximum.)

Is this data transfer rate what I should expect from (my first) USB external HD drive?

Best Regards,

0v3rloader

 

[braddds]

Never believe the "ad's". However, the 6o mb's mentioned are really burst rate's (peak) and not sustained transfer rates which is always much lower...even in the internal drives! They always give you the highest numbers and best case senerio's with advertizing...so is it what to expect, yeah probably!

Cheers

 

[cdogg]

USB 2.0 is just not fast enough for the newest hard drives today. Most drives from the last few years can easily average 45MB/s or higher. However, that average is calculated with peak transfer rates of over 65MB/s (and in some cases with the newer ones, it can reach 80MB/s).

Although peak transfer rates don't happen often, they do matter in the overall average speed of the drive. This very well could be why you are seeing a low average.

Don't get me wrong, though. External drives are great for storage and portability. It's just that the USB 2.0 interface is too much of a bottleneck for the drive to act as a system drive or serve as a destination when installing new programs.

~cdogg
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Albert Einstein
[tab][navy]For general rules and guidelines to get better answers, click here:[/navy] faq219-2884

 

[ski]

The most accurate method for determining the true average data transfer rate for your external HD is to time how long it takes to transfer a few GB of data to it from the internal HD, and then how long it takes to transfer the data back.

 

[stduc]

Transfering small files takes longer than large files - due to system overhead. A single 1GB file will be copied many times faster than a folder containing 1GB of mixed files around 40K in size each.

 

[paparazi]

I agree USB2 interface is a slight bottleneck to the latest hard drives but in practice this is not particularly noticable.
In my opinion, the convenience, portability and versitility of an external USB2 HDD device, far outweighs the price paid in terms of slightly lower performance.

Martin

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