HDD Benchmark too poor ..should i return it?

Hi guys,


just bought a 500 GB Maxtor Basics External HD.

I was trying to transfer 8 GB of data and got only 16 mb/s .. i felt disappointed.


then i did a HD tune and was shocked... the Transfer rates sucked reallly hard compared to other benchmarks i saw on NBR.

see this... should i return it?

 

I assume that you are using a USB connection, right? Because the actual peak bandwidth for USB is about 30MB/s...

 

What? its USB 2.0 ...but as far as i know USB 2.0 has a max operating speed of 480 mb/s?


and some people have gotten upto 90mb/s

is usb 2.0 that bad?

 

The 480 mb/s is not the maximum operating speed but the maximum theoretical speed... there for far off real life.

 

I think you're confusing megabits and megabytes. USB 2.0 has a maximum rate of 480 megabits per second--that's about 60 megabytes per second, in theory. Since the benchmark is showing about 28 megabytes per second transfer speed, I'd say that the transfer speed is pretty much exactly what it should be for USB 2.0.

 

Remember that is 480 megabits per second not megabytes therefore that number has to be divided by 8 to get the megabytes per second number and in this case it is 60MB/s. However you never actually get that because of overhead.

 

Bingo. 480Mbps = 60MB/s

And that is theoretical bandwidth. In all reality, you get about 75% of that at most. 30-40MB/s is about the best anyone will ever see.

Plus, the SATA to USB chip in the enclosure is a bottleneck as well...so the 30MB/s you are getting is about standard for external USB drives.

 

I c...

thanks for clearing ...i always thot its megabytes.. anyway


Btw.. hows the Maxtor 500 GB? ..i couldnt find any reviews on it.

its got 3 yr Warranty and is made after Seagate Acquisition.

 

mine does about 30MB/s . It's a 250GB 5400rpm SimpleDrive HDD

 

Just my two cents. Notice the relative flat line of the graph? That is an obvious indicator that the connection is the bottleneck not the drive itself. All other HDD benchmarks where connection is not the bottleneck. Start higher and become lower having to do with the physical dynamics of a disk. Larger outer smaller inner same RPM's? More data read/write outer vs inner.

30GB's seems great to me. I get like 12MB and 18MB all flat so is my USB2.0 not device (HDD) per se.

 

My experience - on a WD 160gb 7200rpm via USB - I get 32-33MB/s.

 

If using Windows Vista, make sure you've selected "high performance"-mode in the powersavings options. That speeds up my USB2.0 connection by about ~2MB/s as opposed to running in "balanced"-mode. It might have an impact on your system as well, if running Vista. On my laptop, I get a constant (well, as good as constant) 30MB/s over my USB2.0 ports... I find it is a more than sufficient speed for backing up data... (though I'd love 10x that speed, of course )

 

The screenshot is just a Benchmark ..

in practical transfers i get only 15-18 mb/s on high performance.

What to do?