USB 3.0 hubs and transfer speeds? Best practice?

Speed is dependant on a lot of factors such as:

1. Speed of the PCI card
2. What kind of files being transferred and the size of the files
3. The file system of the drive

1. Transferring over the same USB chipset should be faster since it doesn't have to pass through another bus.

2. If you are transferring 1 large file that is 500GB (just an example) it will transfer faster than 500 1GB files. A drive and USB can sustain a higher peak transfer rate on a single large file vs multiple small files. It is why I hate having to backup GBs worth of documents and images at work. If you are transferring a ton of small image files it will take faster as it has to start a new transfer with every file after the last one while with a large contiguous file it will continue at the max speed that the USB and drive is capable of.

3. NTFS is going to be one of the fastest file systems for a drive, most likely what you have is NTFS.

One of your situations, using a HUB built in a external drive, would probably be slower than just connecting the second drive to another USB port on the computer. In this case you have to transfer through the Seagate drive, to the USB chipset and then back to the Seagate drive. Also if the drive you are transferring from has a max of say 50MB/s then even if the receiving drive and bus is faster it will be limited to that 50MB/s.

Speed will depend on the drives. Most external drives are still spinning disks which have maximums most of the time in the 150MB/s range but it does depend on which ones. Most external drives I have seen typically use slower 5400RPM spinning drives which will lower performance. There are two kinds of drives, portable and non portable. Non portable have a better chance at being better drives since they tend to have an external power brick while portable drives usually provide power over USB which is limited vs an AC adapter.

My suggestion is to connect and transfer data from drives over the same USB hub to maximize performance. I did a transfer of a couple GB file from on 64GB Xporter to another of the same model and was pushing 90MB/s the entire time on USB 3.0, which is the rated transfer speed of the drive.

One last reminder, the more devices you have transferring on the same USB HUB the lower speed you will get. I used to make USB Flash drives for a PC repair shop and doing one would take about 5-10 minutes depending on how much data we had to update. However we would do about 10 at a time so it would take a couple hours so we would do them over night.