Seagate Backup Plus USB drive - speed discrepency

Hello -
I have this 1TB USB drive currently attached to my PC and it's working normally.

By this I mean no errors and reasonable performance. It's USB 3 capable,
but the motherboard is USB 2 only.

The system is recent but modest, AMD FX 4300 paired with an ASRock 960GC-GS FX motherboard.

If I copy big files from the internal HDD to the Seagate in Windows 10 I get about 27 MB p/s
It took 30 seconds to copy an 800MB file.

However, on the same PC, using a recent Linux ( Peppermint OS based on Ubuntu) I see speeds
almost double @ 50-52 MB p/s and it took about 16 seconds to copy the same file

That's a massive difference. According to this, the Linux is achieving speeds close the theoretical maximum:
usb - Whats the maximum typical speed possible with a USB2.0 drive? - Super User

If this is so, then I have to ask, why is it slow in Windows 10 ?

A lot depends on how you copy ie explorer, CMD prompt and often anti virus can cause it as it will scan on read and write

Samuria said:

A lot depends on how you copy ie explorer, CMD prompt and often anti virus can cause it as it will scan on read and write

This was easy enough for me to test, first the CMD prompt, then the CMD prompt with Windows Defender
realtime protection turned off. I have to report that it had no effect, still 30 seconds each time,
+/- one second.

Linux is usually faster in both USB 2.0 and USB 3.0, in the same hardware. Also when the operations are performed from boot media. I think it´s mainly because of differences in the USB drivers used by Windows and Linux.

I'm willing to accept driver design and optimizations, etc,etc, but this much difference?
Linux is almost twice as fast.

Berton said:

That ASRock board has 1 PCIe X1 slot that would allow doing what I did [for a different reason on my Win10]. I wanted more USB 3.0 ports so added an older Anker 4-port card, a quite inexpensive upgrade.
Several choices at https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_n...rds=usb+3+card

Thanks for the link to USB add-on cards, since the Seagate BUP slim is a USB 3 device,
I would expect a significant performance gain.. This is something I can think about.

But it doesn't really answer the question as to why Windows 10 utilization of the existing
USB 2 ports is poor compared to Linux. Is this one of those "things" people have just gotten
used to in Windows , nobody questions it anymore ?

I see the difference between my Win10 and my Linux Mint 18.2 computer but it is not a great amount. Could be drivers but the age of the computer may also be involved, my Linux is an older Dell Inspiron 580 Desktop I was given and rehabbed a few years ago and my Win10 is an ASUS M52BC_M32BC I got new last November. According to WikiPedia [and other sources], USB 1.1 speed was 12Mbps, USB 2.0/HighSpeed was 'up to' 480Mbps, USB 3.0/SuperSpeed is 625Mbps. USB 3.0 - Wikipedia

bro67 said:

That is because Fat32 uses a different block structure and the CRC is so out of date. You go to Linux and copy to a Ext4 formatted drive, you will see it go faster. If Fat32, you will still see it go faster, because Linus designed the kernel to be very efficient in CRC and copying in chunks of data that are going to depend on what little bit of cache there is on a hard drive.

The other is that Windows dedicates to a foreground process when moving or copying files, where as Linux does it in the background with the Cron job being told that if something else is running or wanting to run and needs that bandwidth, it will change the data chunks to allow a higher priority process to come up front.

OK I'll research further to see what else I can find. My drive is NTFS, 1TB external HDD not FAT32