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I have a WD Passport 1tb drive, and a 3tb Seagate 3tb GoFlex drive; both are external, both are usb 3.0, and both are slow as molasses: the most I can get out of them is 30MBs.

I've tried copying from one drive to another, copying a file from one place on the drive to another (ie, on the same drive), and copying from the USB drive to the internal SSD, and the performance is still FAR below the 80MBs+ the drive is capable of.

The workstation is a Dell Precision 7500, 192 gig ram, 500 gb ssd internal, 500 gbb hdd internal, win 7 64 bit.

I've also tried attaching just 1 of the usb drives at a time, same results. Any ideas?

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Given the WD passport is bus-powered, I expect you simply have a really slow hard drive, inside the case, and even if you removed it and directly connected it to a SATA port, it would still be slow. It may have nothing to do with the USB connection. The seagate I might blame on the encryption. Have you tried this connected to a different computer? – Zoredache Dec 2 '11 at 19:55
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Do you have a USB 3.0 card or port on the Dell 7500? – Dave M Dec 2 '11 at 20:39

migrated from serverfault.com Dec 2 '11 at 20:21

4 Answers

up vote 6 down vote

Dell Precision T7500 does not have USB 3.0 ports. According to the specs listed on Dell's Website:

Standard I/O Ports

(11) USB 2.0 (two on front panel, six on back panel, three internal)

(2) IEEE 1394a (one front, one rear)
(1) serial
(1) parallel
(2) PS/2
(1) RJ-45
(1) ESATA port on back panel
Stereo line-in and headphone line-out on back panel
Microphone and headphone connector on front panel

Your computer only has USB 2.0 so even though your HD Drives have 3.0 USBs and can handle speeds up to 80MBs, your computers USB port aren't.

USB 2.0 does handle up to 33MBs which coincides with the numbers you are getting because that is the highest your USB 2.0 can handle.

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up vote 5 down vote

The Dell Precision T7500 doesn't have USB 3.0 ports. 30MB/s is the maximum performance you will get with a USB 2.0 connection which seems to be the case.

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Well, I know that using USB2.0, it is not uncommon for USB2 hardware to get speeds as slow as 2.5MB/s . So, USB3 being much faster, 30MB/s might be considered good by some persons. I wouldn't be too concerned unless you were getting speeds that are slower than that.

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up vote -1 down vote

I think the bottleneck would be the HDD in your USB drive.

As you have an internal SSD, your computer drive would not be the bottleneck. And 30MB/s is almost the maximum speed for a 5400RPM HDD, which you have into your USB drive.

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But the Seagate 3tb drive has been benchmarked with sequential reads of 150MBs: anandtech.com/show/3858/… – user994179 Dec 2 '11 at 19:58
So what? You believe in benchmarks? – mailq Dec 2 '11 at 20:03
Sorry the problem is the port not the drive – Jim B Dec 3 '11 at 2:17

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