USB3 external HDD speeds what are you getting

Hi folks

what sort of HDD speeds should you guys be getting say copying files from external USB3 HDD to an internal spinner (not SSD).

(Cheap 5400 RPM drives -- not "Black" or super fast SCSI ones and no RAID in operation).

Same File system on both HDD's (EXT4 in this case as I'm using Linux so no NTFS overhead in conversion. On Windows similar result with NTFS - a bit slower though - but that's windows NTFS limitation).

I'm getting around 260MiB/s (bits) so about 85 MB/s (bytes/sec)



Is that sort of "normalish"

Or could I expect more.

USB3 in theory has almost as much "throughput potential" as e-sata but it never seems to work out quite as fast as I would like.

Cheers
jimbo

That sounds about right. I have seen speeds of around 90MB/sec, but that's about the max.

WD 3TB USB 3 My Book external HD to Seagate 1TB SATA-III 7200 RPM.

Yeah, I think the MyBook runs a 7200 RPM 3.5" drive. I've only run with smaller 2.5" drives on the USB 3 ports.

Thanks guys

around 70 / 90 MB/s in bursts (or up to about 250 Mibs sustained) is fine when you aren't transferring TB worth of data !!!! -

So it's obviously OK to be able to use these sorts of HDD's for extra storage on a NAS - especially if backing up a NAS without it taking forever - and also as a quicker way to upload content rather than over a Network (especially a Wifi one --ugh !!!).

As a test though data transfer on Linux with ext4 seems to outperform Windows considerably (when both disks are running SAME File system - e.g NTFS-> NTFS or EXT4->EXT4 i.e no overhead due to SMB / CIFS or FUSE (Linux ntfs read/write) for SUSTAINED file copying -- Windows can copy small files quite quickly but say copy a 7GB UHD video file and the rate slows to about half of the Linux -- maybe Windows file system set up wrong.

Thanks again for the info on USB 3 speed. It's hard to get "Real use" performance as on the box you get things like max theoretical speed - and with old slower clunky HDD's you are never going to get any where near 3 Gib/s !!!).

Cheers
jimbo

Even with some SSDs you aren't going to get 3 gigabits per second in the real world.