[len112]

I bought a new USB 3 external hard drive to speed up back ups from my new computer , it's connected to a usb 3 port with the right lead but doesn't seem much faster , is there anything I can do to check it's working as it should be ?

[Helmut10]

Your expectations are far too high. They advertise that USB 3 is 10x faster, however the Hard Disk Drive is not.

You can check the speed by timing how long it takes to save say a 1 GB file to it. One large file is quicker than a load of small files totalling 1 GB.

Any HDD drive is limited in speed, which is why you won't see much difference from USB 2 to USB 3.

USB 2 is 480 Mbits/s ~60 MB/s.
USB 3 is 5 Gbits/s ~625 MB/s

Look up the numbers for your USB HDD probably ~ 50 MB/s max or something, thus you will see very little change going to USB 3 barely 50% faster at very rough guess with a large file. If doing small files next to nothing.

[d'@ve]

Originally Posted by len112

I bought a new USB 3 external hard drive to speed up back ups from my new computer , it's connected to a usb 3 port with the right lead but doesn't seem much faster , is there anything I can do to check it's working as it should be ?

Make sure your external hard drive, its enclosure, the USB lead, and the USB port are all USB 3.0. If one of them isn't, you won't gain much if anything.

I've just installed a new USB 3.0 card to match my USB drive and I did some tests. Had to be careful because of caching when re-copying the same files, which messes things up so I had to do a few re-boots to stop this.

So... 3TB USB 3 backup hard drive in an Icybox USB 3 caddy and lead, formatted as NTFS on a GPT partition and using Windows 8. Mobo USB ports are all USB 2, card is USB 3, here are some transfer speed comparisons.

4 Large DVD files

USB 3.0 card:
Copy 4GB in 4 files from 1TB SATA II disk to 3TB backup: 38 seconds, 108MB/s average

USB 2.0 port
Copy the same 4 files from 1TB SATA II disk to 3TB backup disk: 2m 58s, 23.0MB/s average.

234 smallish photo files in 38 folders

USB 3.0 card:
Copy 431MB in 234 files from 1TB SATA II disk to 3TB backup: 10 seconds, 43.1MB/s average

USB 2.0 port
Copy the same 234 files from 1TB SATA II disk to 3TB backup disk: 26 seconds, 16.6MB/s average.

5532 tiny website files in 511 folders

USB 3.0 card:
Copy 777MB in 5532 files from 1TB SATA II disk to 3TB backup: 37 seconds, 21MB/s average (then permanent delete 4s).

USB 2.0 port
Copy the same 5532 files from 1TB SATA II disk to 3TB backup disk: 74 seconds, 10.5MB/s average (then permanent delete 14s).

Conclusions

Large video files: USB 3 was 4.7x faster
Smaller photo files: USB3 was 2.6x faster
Tiny .html files: USB 3 was 2.0x faster
Permanent delete (tiny files): USB 3 was 3.5x faster.

As the bulk of my 1TB hard drive is made up of large files, I estimate that a full backup will be at least 3 times faster on USB 3.0, which means 4 hours instead of 12 and means at last, I can do it comfortably overnight. And tonight's the night!

[flagpole]

All those numbers seem very reasonable Dave.

Just a point on the maths. The average speed is generally set by the slowest thing, because it lasts the longest. So let's say you have two processes that run consecutively for the same amount of time. You speed one of them up by 2x and the other by 100x, on average you have sped up your combined process by about 4x.

[d'@ve]

Yes of course, but as I mentioned, "the bulk of my 1TB hard drive is made up of large files". The vast bulk so I'm hoping for the 3X. Will report back tomorrow.

[REDBUS]

As the bulk of my 1TB hard drive is made up of large files, I estimate that a full backup will be at least 3 times faster on USB 3.0, which means 4 hours instead of 12 and means at last, I can do it comfortably overnight. And tonight's the night!

my a guy right ,BUT mate that's too muck porn ,you'll go blind .

[d'@ve]

Originally Posted by d'@ve

...I'm hoping for the 3X. Will report back tomorrow.

780GB, 3h 10m, 70MB/s, 3.05x faster than when I did 240GB on a smaller disc on usb2 last week.

It's an imperfect comparison I know, because the proportions of small files are different, but on big video files, ISOs, disk partition backups it's 5x faster so we can say 2x to 5x faster depending on content. USB 3 works for me!