USB3 Rip off or not?

<p>I recently bought a Transcend 750Gb USB3 Drive on the basis that it was significantly faster then USB2 which was painfully slow.<br>

I am using a PC with ASRock motherboard with USB3; an i7 quad core processor 8Gb DDR3 RAM 2TB 7200RPM HDD . the PC is fast but transfer speed writing to the Transcend drive appears to be a disappointing 19Mb/sec. As as I am transferring 100s of Gb at a time its painfully slow. Download speed was higher 45MB/sec but that is not good enough either.<br>

I do appreciate the wild claims o the box of 5GB/Sec is unrealistic; but the drive only appears marginally faster than USB2. My supplier agreed with my comments had had the HDD and cable tested but nothing found to be wrong with it.<br>

I did have a Macbook Pro (stolen but not replaced yet) with 2 Firewre 800 drives; a WD 1TB and LaCie 650Gb which were fast enough. I thought USB3 was faster but evidently not!<br>

If can get a Firewire 800 card for my PC that will be OK (but I cannot get locally)<br>

Am I unrealistic in my expectations or are Transcend USB3 drives a rip off?</p>

<p> </p>

<p>Is USB3 actually enabled in the motherboard's BIOS? <br /><br />And, just because the the shop finds that the drive tests OK doesn't mean that the drive itself can handle high read/write speeds (no matter how fast the serial interface is). What are the specs on the drive itself? The interface and the underlying drive aren't the same things, so that's worth a look. But definitely get into the computer's BIOS and check out the port config, legacy USB support, etc. <br /><br />Also: make sure that you're not dragging down the serial bus speed by hanging another, slower device off of it. It's possible that something as dumb as a mouse is forcing the bus to run slowly.</p>

<p>Most motherboard have only 2 USB3 ports, typically they have a different colour. So make sure you identify those, and hook it up to those. And next all the advice Matt's given.<br>

Even then, as said above, the hard disk itself is often enough the bottleneck. If it's a portable drive (based on a 2.5" notebook hard disk), then transfer speeds will not be that high. Desktop drives are much faster typically.<br>

Note, USB 3.0 does 5G<strong>b</strong>/s, which is 8 times less than 5G<strong>B</strong>/s....</p>

<p>So, it's kind of hard to say whether it's a rip-off. Anyway, if you really need to secure yourself of speed in an external drive, use eSATA.</p>

<p>All the reviews I've seen of USB3 hard drives suggest around 50 MB/s is normal (compared to the theoretical 625 MB/S), so I don't think the Transcend is at fault.<br>

Don't forget also that the speed of any process is the speed of its slowest component, so if you're copying from an onboard hard Drive, that may be slowing it down.</p>

<p> </p>

<p>In this case the drive certainly shouldn't be the bottle neck. Even if it is a 4800rpm 2.5" notebook drive (most are 5400rpm, but there are still a handful of low power 4800rpm 2.5" drives made for portable enclosures) it should manage at least 50MB/sec in sustained, sequential writes (unless writing very small files). I have a 4 year old 250GB 2.5" 5400rpm that tests at a bit over 70MB/sec average write over the span of the disk. Fastest comes in around 95MB/sec near the outer tracks and the slowest is around 50MB/sec on the inner tracks.<br>

This being a newer drive I'd assume at least as much possible performance.<br>

Just because it is USB3 though, there is no telling what kind of host interface card is in the enclosure itself. From the sounds of it, a very, very bad one. Transcend isn't exactly noted as the best manufacturer around. USB3 should be easily capable of matching eSATA for transfer speeds. Higher access times because of interface "lag", but sequential speed should be similar. Of course even with an excellent host interface on the enclosure and an excellent USB3 interface on your motherboard or chipset, you probably will see 5-10% reduction in performance over what the drive in the enclosure could manage over SATA natively.</p>

<p>Now a bad intereface on the enclosure or motherboard, that is a different story.</p>

<p>Thanks for the useful info.<br>

The Motherboard has a single USB3 port clearly labelled; it was the first thing I checked. My PC engineer looked at the BIOS and updated it. This did improve the speed from circa 8mb/sec to 20mb/Sec<br>

I have 2 other transcend USB2 Portable drives but don't know the speed of any of them.<br>

Reading from the new Transcend USB3 drive started out at 95MB/s initially from the HDD reducing to 45mb/sec.<br>

Writing to the drive, the speed briefly started at 45mb/s but dropped to around 20mb/sec.<br>

Is his normal??</p>

<p> </p>

<p>A thought - is your virus scanner slowing down the transfer ?</p>

<blockquote>

<p>Reading from the new Transcend USB3 drive started out at 95MB/s initially from the HDD reducing to 45mb/sec.<br /> Writing to the drive, the speed briefly started at 45mb/s but dropped to around 20mb/sec.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Modern drives use internal RAM buffers to artificially inflate the transfer rates, primarily as a sales gimmick.</p>

<p>When writing to the drive, the RAM buffer fills with data waiting to be written to the actual surfaces.</p>

<p>Anticipatory full-cylinder reads put data in the RAM buffer when you initiate a read, with the expectation that subsequent read requests will be for that sequential data.</p>

<p>These technologies work fine for small to medium transfers, within the limits of the buffer size.</p>

<p>Once your transfer exceeds that amount on a sustained basis, the actual transfer rate drops to what the physical drive can support. This is way lower than the full-bandwidth rates of eSATA or USB3.</p>

<p>The only successful solution to this problem was the old IBM head-per-track configuration which could write the entire multi-platter disk in one revolution. Of course it was huge and horribly expensive.</p>

<p>Modern solid-state disks (SSDs) can do high-speed reads, but are limited in their write speed.</p>

<p>BTW, due to the HUGE protocol overhead of USB (all flavors), it can never achieve a sustained throughput greater than 50% of its nominal speed.</p>

<p>- Leigh</p>

 

<blockquote>

<p>A thought - is your virus scanner slowing down the transfer ?</p>

</blockquote>

<p>That's a good possibility.<br>

If your AV program does on-access scanning, turn that feature off while you do the transfer.</p>

<p>- Leigh</p>

 

<p>I was going to ask what security software do you have running? AV is just one component. I've had a Microsoft update reactivate the Microsoft firewall even though I have a third party firewall running and that slowed all sorts of things down, seemingly unrelated things as well.</p>

<p>From what I've read USB3 is supposed to set the speed to each device independent of other devices on the bus. This is an improvement over previous USB standards that the speed was set by the slowest device.</p>

<p>There's also the thought of opening the Task Manager (Ctrl Shift Esc) and seeing if there's anything using a large amount of the computers resources. You'll want to compare what's going on before and during file transfers.</p>

<p>Download a hard drive speed test such as HDTach from http://www.simplisoftware.com/Public/index.php?request=HdTach<br>

It will tell you how fast the drive is without any limits being imposed by the operating system.</p>