ok my drive copies files at a steadyish 50MB/s which is lovely thanks :) but usb 3 can go faster and the speeds rated for the drive are faster too. So is there anything i can set in windows to get it going even faster? Im trying to update to the newest firmware at the moment but getting problems, so once that is done should i see a speed boost?
Hello,
You should remember that the data is transferred to the destination, only as fast it is being read off the source.
USB 2.0 has a maximum theoretical speed limit of 60 MB/s. Actually, it is only today, 8 years after the launch of USB 2, that USB 2 devices are able to fully exploit this speed (even then, there are not too many which can do this). Most of the USB 2 devices today max out at 30-35 MB/s. I’ve already given the reason for this, the read-write speeds of devices bottlenecks the transfer process.
So for USB 3, don’t expect speeds of 400 MB/s +; since even though the data could be transferred at that rate, it cannot be read off the source HDD or written to the external drive at the same rate. Now if you were to hook up a superfast SSD to the dock, & also had a similar speed SSD in your system, then the transfer process would be definitely faster, since both drives could read & write lightening fast.
So it is more likely that the transfers you are doing are bottlenecked by the storage drives, in particular, their sequential read/write speeds; not due to the fault of USB 3.
