Slow Copy Speeds

[seedy]

Toshiba Canvio Portable HDD 3TB and Toshiba 17"laptop with dual 750GB HDD

I use the portable HDD to store movies, then copy to my laptop for viewing on my flatscreen.

Copy speeds start high, but taper down to less than 10MB towards the end.

Am using USB 3.0 port too.

Any idea why the speeds are so slow ?

Thanks

[rhythmworx]

Is your external HDD USB 3 compliant?

[Crossy]

I can't offer a solution, but I see this too, on several machines.

I suspect it's some kind of buffer being filled but as to a fix (or even if there is a fix)...

[seedy]

Is your external HDD USB 3 compliant?

Yes. The copies start out at 80 mb and then degrade from there.

[Chicog]

Try using TeraCopy.

[Crossy]

Try using TeraCopy.

Looks interesting, will try tonight. Thanks.

[thedemon]

I would try the USB drive on another (USB 3.0 capable) PC and if possible, also try another USB 3.0 drive on your Toshiba to identify the culprit.

The way you have described it, my money would be on some issue with the write speed on the notebook. As suggested by others, once the cache is full the copy operation slows down to the actual maximum write speed. Because you are copying from the USB drive and since the transfer speeds are OK initially it doesn't sound like a USB issue to me.

Since you say there are 2 x 750GB drives in the notebook, they're not setup in a RAID 1 (Disk Mirror) are they? Windows software RAID or Storage Spaces will behave like this when writing large amounts of data.

[Tywais]

Try using TeraCopy.

Or FastCopy.

[seedy]

Since you say there are 2 x 750GB drives in the notebook, they're not setup in a RAID 1 (Disk Mirror) are they? Windows software RAID or Storage Spaces will behave like this when writing large amounts of data.

How would I see if they are set up as a RAID - this is a term I have not heard before.

I did nothing to it since new, it came as it sits on the desk at this moment.

But one 750 GB drive is empty - I store all movies on the portable HDD's

Drive C - 432 GB free of 684 Drive D - 684 free of 684

Edited September 9, 2014 by seedy

[Pib]

Since you say there are 2 x 750GB drives in the notebook, they're not setup in a RAID 1 (Disk Mirror) are they? Windows software RAID or Storage Spaces will behave like this when writing large amounts of data.

How would I see if they are set up as a RAID - this is a term I have not heard before.

I did nothing to it since new, it came as it sits on the desk at this moment.

But one 750 GB drive is empty - I store all movies on the portable HDD's

Drive C - 432 GB free of 684 Drive D - 684 free of 684

You sure you got two "physical" drives in the laptop, or just one 1.5GB drive that came equally partitioned as Drive C and Drive D. Quite common for new computers to come setup this way. You could check in your Windows Control Panel, System, Device Manager, Disk Drives to see how many drives you have.

[seedy]

You sure you got two "physical" drives in the laptop, or just one 1.5GB drive that came equally partitioned as Drive C and Drive D. Quite common for new computers to come setup this way. You could check in your Windows Control Panel, System, Device Manager, Disk Drives to see how many drives you have.

Following your directions above, it lists two disk drives.

With the identical model number, so I assume there are two physical HDD - not one with a partition.

[thedemon]

It doesn't sound like RAID then. That was just a guess because 2 identical drives in a notebook is quite unusual.

What is the exact model number of your Toshiba? I would do some googling with the model number and "slow disk write" or "slow file copy" to see if others have had the same issue. 10MB/s is too slow so the chances are quite high you will be able to find the source of the problem.

[seedy]

Toshiba Satellite P775-0FW

PSBY3C-0FW00R

Running Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

Thanks for your help

Copy speeds start above 100 MBS but slow down to 10 mbs after aprox 20-30 seconds

Edited September 10, 2014 by seedy

[thedemon]

Seems like that model is specifically for the Canadian market and not too much info out there. Reviews of similar US models do criticize the relatively slow 5400rpm drives but that wouldn't explain speeds as slow as you are experiencing.

If it was my notebook I would swap out the primary drive for an SSD. Since it has an i7 and 8GB RAM, it would fly along nicely and boot up in a fraction of the time it takes now.

Looks very easy to do on that model and since you have a second HDD you can just create an image of C: on D: drive, physically swap C: for the SSD and reimage back from D:. Should take about an hour.

[Pib]

Yeap, that's a two hard drive model. I also see it has one USB 3 port and three USB 2 ports. OP, you sure you were using the USB 3 port which would be "blue" on the inside; USB 2 ports are black on the inside?

Anyway, your problem interests me and I've been doing some googling on your problem (quite a common problem on all makes of computers) and even doing some testing on my old ass/8 year old laptop which has both USB 3 and USB 2 ports (I added the USB 3 port capability with a PCExpress plug in card) and my less than one year old Lenovo i7 laptop with USB 3 and 2 ports. In the test I've been transferring a MPEG movie file 1.4GB in size. Nothing of significance to report so far. I aborted testingthis morning as Windows updates came out and there are about a dozen Win 8.1 and Win 7 update files to download/install on my three laptops plus I got to honey-do things to do this morning.

[thedemon]

Yeap, that's a two hard drive model. I also see it has one USB 3 port and three USB 2 ports. OP, you sure you were using the USB 3 port which would be "blue" on the inside; USB 2 ports are black on the inside?

Anyway, your problem interests me and I've been doing some googling on your problem (quite a common problem on all makes of computers) and even doing some testing on my old ass/8 year old laptop which has both USB 3 and USB 2 ports (I added the USB 3 port capability with a PCExpress plug in card) and my less than one year old Lenovo i7 laptop with USB 3 and 2 ports. In the test I've been transferring a MPEG movie file 1.4GB in size. Nothing of significance to report so far. I aborted testingthis morning as Windows updates came out and there are about a dozen Win 8.1 and Win 7 update files to download/install on my three laptops plus I got to honey-do things to do this morning.

Since the op says that the copy operation starts out at 100MB/s, I don't think it can be a case of using a USB2.0 port by mistake.

You're right about the updates. After I saw your post, I checked and sure enough - 1.2GB of them! Isn't it nicknamed "update Tuesday"?

[Chicog]

"Patch Tuesday".

Although with that amount of patches they might as well call it "Complete Reinstall Tuesday".

[thedemon]

"Patch Tuesday".

Although with that amount of patches they might as well call it "Complete Reinstall Tuesday".

Haha. Right after the 1.2GB were done, another 670MB's worth showed up.

[Chicog]

Seedy, what were the results of Teracopy of Fastcopy?

[Chicog]

"Patch Tuesday".

Although with that amount of patches they might as well call it "Complete Reinstall Tuesday".

Haha. Right after the 1.2GB were done, another 670MB's worth showed up.

It's like pulling teeth.

[Pib]

Just some feedback on some USB 3 and USB 2 testing I did on two of my laptops...one laptop less than one year old....another laptop going on 8 years old.

(1) a going on 8 year old Toshiba Pentium Core Duo with SATA 1 internal drive interface (150MB speed) hooked to an internal Seagate 480GB SSD capable of 500MB read/write speeds...with the laptop only having a SATA 1 interface with a 150MB max speed the SSD is always waiting on my SATA 1 interface. I have USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 ports on this laptop...USB 3.0 ports via a PCExpress plug-in card as USB 3 was even around when this computer was made...USB 2 was top dog.

(2) a less than 1 year old Lenovo i7 Quad Core with SATA 3 internal drive interface (600MB speed) hooked to an internal Samsung 840 EVO 500GB SSD capable of 500MB read/write speeds.

I had a Seagate 1TB hard disk drive (SATA 3) in an USB 3.0 external enclosure box and tested on the USB 3 and 2 ports of both computers by copying a 1.45GB MPEG movie /file to the laptops. Results follow:

Toshiba Pentium Core Duo CPU Laptop

On USB 2.0 port the transfer starts at around 60MB speed for a second or two then drops to a steady 32MB

On USB 3.0 port the transfer starts at around 77MB speed for a second or two and then drops to a steady 40MB

Lenovo i7 CPU Laptop

On USB 2.0 port the transfer starts and stays steady at a 42MB speed

On USB 3.0 port the transfer starts and stays steady at a 101MB speed.

Note: Now USB 3 and USB 2 have theoretical max transfer speeds of 640MB and 60MB, respectively. But in the real world they won't come to anything close to that max speed due to various reasons.

Above data don't really help the OP solve his problem but it may give him an idea of what he should be getting which may be approaching 100MB sustained transfer speed on a USB 3 port "if" his internal drive can "write" at a 100MB speed sustained speed which it may or may not be able to do because I think the hard drives he has are only SATA 2 drives based on researching his computer's part number and looking up some benchmarks on the drives he probably has in his laptop. He's probably looking at a 50MB to 90MB "sustained" copy speed (i.e.., writing to these drives) although seeing a much higher initial burst of speed.

[Pib]

"Patch Tuesday".

Although with that amount of patches they might as well call it "Complete Reinstall Tuesday".

Haha. Right after the 1.2GB were done, another 670MB's worth showed up.

All depends on what a person has loaded on his 'puter. I updated my three laptops this morning...two on Win 7 and one on Win 8.1. The updates went OK-fine and I always do a "Check for Updates" right after an update since an update can often drive other updates, but today none of the three 'puters pulled any more updates...said I was up to date.

[Pib]

Toshiba Satellite P775-0FW

PSBY3C-0FW00R

Running Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

Thanks for your help

Copy speeds start above 100 MBS but slow down to 10 mbs after aprox 20-30 seconds

From looking up Satellite P775 on the Toshiba website it comes up with various models (10 of them) like P775-SXXXX with the X's defining the various models. Anyway, I looked at the P775-S7236 model (chose it at random), looked under the USB driver area and it had a USB 3.0 driver date mid 2011 and over 10MB in size.

Since many laptops have specific drivers that are not contained in drivers that come with Windows, you may want to confirm that you have the correct USB 3 driver loaded. Maybe if the Microsoft generic USB 3.0 driver is loaded it's not optimized for your laptop's USB 3 circuitry. I had a similar issue with an external Western Digital Passport Ultra USB drive...until I loaded the Western Digital "SES" driver for this drive from the Western Digital support website the transfer speed was slow and sometimes the computer would identify it as a USB 2 speed drive.. But once I installed the WD SES driver it's speed doubled and it was always identified as a USB 3 drive....the problem was all "driver" related.

[seedy]

Using the USB 3 port - right next to the HDMI port.

Have not tried Teracopy or the other one suggested - wanted to read replies from savvy users to see if my problem could be resolved.

Sounds like they cheaped out - will try to get data on sustained write speeds.

Not a real problem - just bugs me that a one year laptop will copy so slow.

Many thanks to all for your replies.

This is what I love about Thai Visa - the helping hand extended to those with a problem/concern/question.

Don't like the sniping much - but that is all part of it, ain't it !