Why is my WD 3.0 USB external hd transferring so slow?

[gatorade]

I was just trying to use this hard drive , and it's taking a really long time for the computer to access the files.
transferring files is very slow as well.

could this be related to a driver issue?

[Cobber]

Are you using a USB extension cable?

USB 3.0 extension cables have extra pins. If you are using a standard cable, your computer will see your HDD as USB 2.0

[gatorade]

I have the right cable , it's got the blue USB 3.0 connector , it came with the drive.

[Cobber]

I have the right cable , it's got the blue USB 3.0 connector , it came with the drive.

But are you using an extension cable between your HDD and the computer? For example, the USB 3.0 ports are on the rear of your computer, so you cannot plug your drive in without it.

Just saw your computer model, a laptop. So my question is probably not relevant. Are you sure you are actually using the USB 3.0 ports, and not the USB 2.0 ones?

[gatorade]

ya , I'm using the correct USB port. It's on the left side , beside the HDMI port and it's blue so it's for USB 3.0.
I'm pretty sure it's an issue with the external drive, it just takes forever to even recognize the drive..

[Mute Ant]

The continuous raw read speed is easy to check. This result is from my USB3 boot-drive connected to a USB2 port...

Code: Select all

### Continuous raw-read test ... ... ... [34.5MB/s]
    pv /dev/sda > /dev/zero

EXT4 and VFAT read and write files at speeds similar to raw reads. If your external drive is formatted NTFS, you get roughly 1/3 the raw-read speed during real file transfers.

[phd21]

Hi "gatorade",

I just read your post and the good replies to it. Here are my thoughts on this as well.

I have two WD USB external hard drives for backing up, 1 terabyte (1000 gigabyte) each, a WD Passport Slim (grey color), and a Passport Ultra (Blue Color). The "Ultra" is much faster than the "Slim", and both are small in size? I purposely partitioned both drives into "ext4" Linux format, and the MS Windows NTFS format for compatibility with other systems. The Linux "ext4" file system format is so much faster than the MS Windows "NTFS" file system format. If you do not need to have the drives formatted for NTFS for MS Windows systems, then re-format the drive to Linux "ext4" file system format. You could format them like I did, using something like 800 gb for "ext4", and 200 gb for "NTFS", or something like that.

If you have another USB 3.x port, you can always try that as well. My ancient slow computer system does not even have USB 3.x ports, but on my computer, I have noticed conflicts with USB v2 devices where using a different USB port makes all the differences.

You can use the console terminal command "lsblk" to identify what drives and partitions are available

Benchmarking drive speeds: (test drive's speed and data transfer rates)

1.) How can I benchmark my HDD?
http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions ... ark-my-hdd
"I usually use hdparm to benchmark my HDD's. You can benchmark both the direct reads and the cached reads. You'll want to run the commands a couple of times to establish an average value."
Examples
Here's a direct read.
sudo hdparm -t /dev/sda2
/dev/sda2:
Timing buffered disk reads: 302 MB in 3.00 seconds = 100.58 MB/sec

And here's a cached read.
sudo hdparm -T /dev/sda2
/dev/sda2:
Timing cached reads: 4636 MB in 2.00 seconds = 2318.89 MB/sec

2.) * Tune Your Hard Disk with hdparm *
http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/Fe ... ith-hdparm

hdparm -I /dev/sda | more

Speedometer - To determine how fast a drive delivers data, use the
hdparm -t /dev/sda

3.) Hard drive speed test using Linux command line and hdparm
https://linuxconfig.org/hard-drive-spee ... and-hdparm

4.)Benchmarking/Data storage devices - various methods
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Be ... ge_devices

5.) WHDD is a HDD diagnostic and recovery tool available for all Linux Distributions.
Link1
http://linuxg.net/how-to-install-whdd-2 ... ry-os-0-2/
Link2
http://www.geekssharingspace.org/2014/0 ... anced.html

Link3 - whdd.org
http://whdd.org/get_it/

To install "WHDD" using the PPA method, open a console terminal, type in, or copy & paste, each line below one by one:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:eugenesan/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get whdd


6.) Previous post: Is there a good program to install on linux to check a hard drive and to run utilities on fixing issues.
viewtopic.php?t=199705


Hope this helps ...

FYI: Example of Information

I am currently running from a Patriot USBv2 flash drive stick 16gb, and I have my WD USB external Passport Slim drive in.
user>lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda 8:0 0 232.9G 0 disk - main primary hard drive WD IDE/Pata
├─sda1 8:1 0 230.9G 0 part /media/user69/ - Linux Mint main hard drive
├─sda2 8:2 0 1K 0 part
└─sda5 8:5 0 2G 0 part
sdb 8:16 1 14.9G 0 disk - Patriot USB v2 flash drive stick 16gb
├─sdb1 8:17 1 12.9G 0 part / - USB flash drive stick with Fully installed Linux Mint (currently booted)
├─sdb2 8:18 1 1K 0 part
└─sdb5 8:21 1 2G 0 part [SWAP]
sdc 8:32 0 931.5G 0 disk - WD Passport Slim (Grey), 1 terabyte (1000gb)
├─sdc1 8:33 0 119G 0 part - NTFS -
└─sdc2 8:34 0 812.5G 0 part - Ext4 -
sr0 11:0 1 13.1M 0 rom - DVD/CD burner 1
sr1 11:1 1 1024M 0 rom - DVD/CD burner 2
=============================================================================================
Hard drive
user~ > sudo hdparm -t /dev/sda1
/dev/sda1:
Timing buffered disk reads: 226 MB in 3.00 seconds = 75.31 MB/sec
USB Flash drive Stick
user~ > sudo hdparm -t /dev/sdb1
/dev/sdb1:
Timing buffered disk reads: 80 MB in 3.05 seconds = 26.21 MB/sec

Passport Drive Slim (Grey)
user~ > sudo hdparm -t /dev/sdc1
/dev/sdc1: ntfs
Timing buffered disk reads: 70 MB in 3.03 seconds = 23.11 MB/sec

user~ > sudo hdparm -t /dev/sdc2
/dev/sdc2: ext4
Timing buffered disk reads: 76 MB in 3.00 seconds = 25.33 MB/sec

...