USB transfer speed from external hard drive to external hard drive

witefoda · 28 Feb 2021

I'm having a hard time finding which USB ports on my laptop and its dock are v3 or v2 (or less possibly), but when I tried two different ports (I think one is v3), they both seemed to transfer at about 150KBps... which seems slow even for USB v2.

I'm copying files from an older hard drive (connected externally) to my backup drive partition (through the dock), and right now it's transferring at about 8KBps... now, there's a crap ton of little files in there because a lot of them came from coding sessions, and many of them I'm not even aware of because they're either from downloads I made or git repos or npm packages etc; I don't know if that really slows down the transfer rate, but maybe.

USB transfer speed from external hard drive to external hard drive-usb-transfer-speed-coding.png

Can someone enlighten me on why this doesn't seem to be anywhere near even halfway to USB 2 max speeds? I understand max speed will probably never happen, but I'm miffed at how slow it's going.

Pejole2165 · 28 Feb 2021

Depending on how far into the copy you are I would suggest stopping it, putting the files in a Zip, then copy, so that you get a more constant sequential write when copying.
The files may not compress much due to their type, but that is not important, the sequential write is.
The built in Windows Zip function should be good enough, test to see how quick the Zip creation is for a certain sized folder then adjust so that you get optimal Zip file size for decent sequential copying. Other than that, yes, a lot of small files will slow the drives down.

wiganken · 01 Mar 2021

Transfer speed is dependent on the 'Read' speed from your old hard drive as well as the 'Write' speed to your backup drive. Normally these should be quite fast but if there is a problem with either drive then this could slow down transfer speed a lot and 150 KB/s is so slow as to point to a problem somewhere along the transfer path.

I suspect your drives are HDDs, not SSDs, but I get 305 MB/s transferring between two external SSDs connected to two USB 3.1 ports. This is over 2000x faster than your transfer speed so I suggest you run CHKDSK with repair switch on both drives? See https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/win...ommands/chkdsk

Try3 · 01 Mar 2021

witefoda said:

I'm having a hard time finding which USB ports on my laptop and its dock are v3 or v2 (or less possibly) ...

If your computer manual does not tell you then try USB Device Tree Viewer
I've never used it but I understand it will report on the properties of each of your USB ports.

Denis