Essentials 2TB USB 3.0 Poor Performance on Lenovo W520

WD External Drives External Drives for PC
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Hi all.  I am using a Lenovo W520 laptop with Win7 64bit and 24GB RAM and an internal SSD with very little software installed and have tried both USB 3.0 ports on the W520.  Win7 is patched to SP1.

My Book Essentials 2TB USB 3.0 drive has terrible performance writing from my C to it.  The performance, according to the Windows Copy dialog box is about 30MB/sec at best…it usually hovers around 20MB/sec.  If I write FROM the Essentials back to C, I get about 130MB/sec.  I am copying video files ranging from 50MB to 800MB in size…transferring about 35GB of them to the Essentials box.  I also did a transfer tonight of about 1.5GB of files from my SSD to the WD drive and it took well over a minute…seems quite slow and the bottleneck is not the SSD because I had a 7200RPM drive in the W520 before and the USB 3.0 transfer was the same slowness.  Even if the scenario pushed a crummy 50MB/sec my 1.5GB transfer should have taken 30 seconds.  100MB/sec should have taken about 15 seconds.

I am definitely using the USB 3.0 port.  I see nothing on the WD site for help.

Western Digital’s automatic firmware updater (forget the name) updated the firmware from .003 to .007 and I rebooted the laptop and power cycled the WD unit…no effect.  I am praying that this is not expected performance!

Any ideas?  If you need driver or version confirmations, please be very specific where I can find that information.

I do not have any USB 2.0 devices attached.  I’ve updated the Intel chipset and USB 3.0 drivers from the Lenovo site today.  I do notice that this WD drive performs pretty bad on my older XP desktops with the USB 3.0 PCI card too.  I’m hoping, in the W520 case, that this is either a bad USB 3.0 cable or maybe some kind of W520 firmware/Win7 driver issue.

I don’t expect 100.00% USB 3.0 promises but 20MB/sec transfer speed is worthless.  It’s possible Windows is not quite accurate in representing the speed, but it can’t be telling me 20MB/sec when it’s really, say, 100MB/sec.  :)  And I wouldn’t be sitting here staring at the wall waiting for what seems an eternity to transfer 1.5GB.  :slight_smile:

Thanks in advance!

-Fred

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I’ll suggest to try other app to test the performance

here is link with 5 other options

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5-lightweight-tools-to-check-the-speed-of-your-usb-flash-drive-windows/

have you tested the 3.0 port with a different drive?

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Attached are the results.  I really don’t believe it’s 124MB/sec but even that speed seems off…maybe that’s the max or is it really the average?  Because even if it was 100MB/sec, after 60 seconds it should have written 6GB…and if I were trying to write 60GB that would be 10 minutes @ 100MB/sec.  The 60GB transfer I performed last night took over 30 minutes if I remember correctly…I will do the 60GB test again and report back the results.

My SSD stats are below in the next reply for my C drive…which was pushing to the Western Digital external…the SSD, as you can see, is far faster for the reads so the SSD was not a bottleneck in the transfer.

Thanks in advance again!

  USB3 external

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here are my SSD C drive stats…which is only a Sata II 3Gbs speed SSD

SSD stats