what is the transfer speed of usb 3.0 portable drive

hi, my portable hard drive is bought recently and supports usb 3.0 of course but unfortunately my motherboard is very low -end which supports only usb 2.0.



Now the maximum and the average speed that I usually observe of transferring the files from my system drive to the portable drive is around 30Mb per second.

I'd like to know what would the speed likely to be if my motherboard supported USB 3.0

thinking if I should replace a new board

 

Its speed is 10 times greater than USB 2.0.

Doesn't mean it will scale like that, depends on the flash drive.

 

i know it's 10 times greater but it's onlyin theory. what's the reality

 

Yes. Theoretical USB 3.0 rates are around 640MB/s. It will depend on the device. For example, I get 110+MB/second on large sequential transfers from mechanical hdd (in USB3 enclosure) to SSD (internal SATA)

 

Well its similar to how USB 2.0 is twice as fast as the speeds your getting.

USB 3.0 strongly depends on the drive and data being transferred. You can get pretty high up there but usually yeah around 100 is pretty typical.

 

Like what was already mentioned, it depends on the hardware within your external hard drive. But in any case, you'll be limited to USB 2.0 speeds (as you saw with the 30 MB/s) until you use it with 3.0 hardware.

 

Most 2.5" HDDs have peak transfer rates of little over 100MB/s (they have been around that value for several years) and it's the HDD itself which is the bottleneck when using USB 3.0. I've got a Sandisk Extreme USB 3.0 SSD which gives transfer rates in excess of 300MB/s but both the drive and the computer need to support UAS to achieve this speed.

John

 

The speed will depend if you have a 2.5in or 3.5 in hard drive. For my smaller 2.5in USB 3.0 I usually get closer to 100MB for transfer of large files. For my 3.5in drive I can get closer to 140MB.

 

Physical size if the drive doesn't actually matter, what matters is the interface (SATA 3, USB 3, for example), the hardware inside the drive (controller, cache, platters, etc), the computer's hardware, and what files you're transferring (larger files tend to have a more consistent and faster transfer than smaller files on the same hardware).

 

The drive size (like tbonepile mentioned) and the tech 'year' of the drive matters too. Not to mention the spindle speed, of course.

The larger drive has data moving much faster under it's heads (and 'has to' and can read it faster) than the smaller drives do - even at the same nominal spindle speed.

Yeah; the interface matters and the hardware components matter too - my 'tech year' captures all of that. And agreed about small vs. large files too - when measuring (mostly) sequential performance.