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slow usb 3.0 please help

Tags:
  • Laptops
  • USB3
  • Windows 7
Last response: in Windows 7
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May 30, 2014 10:42:43 AM

Hello everyone this is my first post so bare with me, thanks.

I have a dell laptop running Windows 7 with a Toshiba MK2576GSX -250Gb - 5400rpm hard drive. The laptop only came stock with usb 2.0. I bought an USB 3.0 expansion card because I have a 2Tb USB 3.0 Seagate external drive and wanted to get the most out of it. I realize that the on-board drive could be bottle-necking the speeds as it's only 5400rpm, and it's not solid state, etc. Also, the expansion card could be garbage. It came with a usb DC optional power cable... It is a Startech 2-port ExpressCard similar to this link below, if not exactly this. I have not tried using the power cable that came with it, but I'm going to dig through my wires and try using it.

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O=&sku=...

I notice a great difference in speeds copying verses moving. Copying is much faster, but still maxes out at about 25mb/s and that's usually only when copying larger folders. Even when I copy something from the computer to a flash drive via usb 2, it'll give me up to 25mb/s. There are no exclamation marks or red x's in the devise manager. And the drivers are up to date and working fine from what I can see...

I'm constantly moving massive amounts of data from computer to external. 25mb/s is a slap in the face compared to 5gb/s or even 1gb/s for that matter, Especially when moving 20gigs plus at a time. If anyone has any suggestions please help. Thanks so much!

More about : slow usb

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a b D Laptop
May 30, 2014 10:53:07 AM

ultimately you're being limited by your harddrive's speed. which is evident by seeing teh same transfer rate whether usb 3 or 2.

Copy will be quicker b/c it's just a read process on your hard drive.
"move" requires a read AND a write process (the process to delete the files from the hard drive)

This is just going from Hard disk to USB.

it's a little different when you 'move' files on your hard drive from one fold to another... that's actually faster than a copy b/c it's not actually reading and writing anything... it's only changing the file path to the files.
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May 30, 2014 11:15:51 AM

Thank you for your quick response. I just remembered I have another USB 3.0 drive. This one is a 1Tb and is portable while the 2Tb needs to plug into an outlet. Anyway, since the expansion card has (2) usb 3 slots I'm copying 55gigs of data from one to the other. It is faster but not by much. It's topping out at around 35mb/s. The on-board hard drive is still being used during this process, yes?
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