USB 2.0 Transfer Speed 1

[robinsiebler]

I just purchased an external USB 2.0 hard drive. It is connected to a USB 2.0 expansion card on my WinXP system. The site I purchased the drive speed as "up to 430MB/sec". However, when I copied an 11 GB file to the drive, it took about an hour. This was after I enabled write caching to speed up performance.

How can I make it faster?

 

[happydownloader]

Get a firewire one!
Lots faster then USB 2
USB 2 has three speeds: 1.5, 12 and 480Mbps
Make sure you read your manual on how to set them
USB 2 still has lots of limits compaired to what a normal IDE cabled drive can do

 

[nlm9802]

even firewire has limits compared to direct ATA cables..

as far as external drives it is superior to USB and USB 2.0

if you benchmark the ata133 drive that sits in the pretty translucent box with a regular ata133 cable you will see some excellent readings..

http://geekspeak.org/articles/6/

when it goes via firewire those benchmarks drop considerably.

comparing usb 2.0 to firewire you see another performance drop going over to usb 2.0 ...

http://www.techtv.com/screensavers/supergeek/jump/0,24331,3393574,00.html

I have to agree, get a firewire drive..

 

[cdogg]

Nope, there's nothing wrong with using USB over firewire. USB 2.0 (480mbps) is actually faster than firewire (400mbps). Since there's 8 bits in a byte, then you would have to divide that 480 by 8 which gives you around 60MB/s.

The other thing you have to take into account is the average transfer rate of hard drives. A decent drive will average around 30-35MB/s read and about 20-25MB/s write. So being conservative, we can take:

60min x 60sec x 20MB/s = 72,000MB or 70.3GB

Now, you might be wondering why it still takes a whole hour just to transfer 11GB. Well, I suspect the problem might either be the file(s) being fragmented or that you have an extrememly slow destination drive. There's some overhead involved, but you should easily be able to transfer 11GB within about 15 minutes. Try defragmenting both drives and also experiment with smaller file sizes.


~cdogg
[tab]"All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind"
[tab][tab]- Aristotle
[navy]For general rules and guidelines to get better answers, click here:[/navy] faq219-2884

 

[bjdobs]

I just picked up a BYTECC ME-320 External IDE USB 2.0 kit and stuck a WD Caviar Drive in it 40G 7200RPM 8M Cache ... I was expecting better performance as well however when I copy the I386 dir (DELL XP PRO OEM) which is about 1 G worth of files it is taking about 11 minutes to copy.

I did the math and it would appear that the USB interface is running in Full mode 12Mbps ... however I then decided to do a test by doing a local copy ... this took the same time ... I then disabled my internet connection and disabled NIS 2k4 still no change

I can only assume that either the laptop drive, XP Pro or some other process is involved in slowing down the copy times (the external drive is set to write through) no cache)

A 1.1G AVI file transferred in 8 Minutes

I am going to turn on the write cache and test this file again

 

[bjdobs]

Changing the Write Cache made no difference ... still 8 minutes for a 1.1G AVI file

This Laptop I believe has a 5400 rpm drive so it is not quite as fast as the WD but 8 Minutes still seems high???

Is there any utilities out there that could test the true speed of this USB interface???