Less than expected write speed

[ihrsetrdr]

I recently bought a Seagate Portable Hard Drive 5TB HDD, am currently backing up about a half TB to it from my desktop sig rig. Perhaps my expectations are unrealistic, in any case my knowledge is thin on the "in & outs" of data transfer. The drive is formatted NTFS, and the file system being copied from is EXT4 in Ubuntu MATE. I'm using a USB3.0 port on the Asrock 79 and the portable drive's cable. The data transfer rate started at abt 50MB/s but towards the end was writing at 17MB/s. The manner by which I'm coping the files is simply highlighting-copy-paste type operation.

Does choosing more data at a time cause the data writes to "choke"? I was hoping to just choose the whole 1/2TB of data and start copying, but that became insanely slow.

Suggestions for improving the data transfer operation would be greatly appreciated.

 

[EarthDog]

More or less data as a whole won't matter. The number of files, however, does. If you have 1TB worth of data in 100 files, it will transfer faster than 1TB with 10,000 files.

The 50 MB/s you are seeing is burst and using cache. After that, I'd gather you're limited by USB 3.0(?). I'm not entirely sure.

 

[ihrsetrdr]

Thanks guys, good info. I really haven't focused much on storage and data speed matters since having a Raid 0 array with a couple 10K Raptors was a big deal.

What if: would an add-on card, like some kind of USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 card give me what I want? Or, does my x79 board's PCI Express 3.0 "ready" slots have too narrow bandwidth?

 

[freakdiablo]

Sorry, I replied the other day but deleted the post because the touchscreen on my phone is on drugs that I can only wish to afford. Yeah I know, only a fool blames his tools, or however the saying goes.

I actually don't think it's a USB 3.0 issue. I have an 8tb WD Element hooked up to my desktop via onboard USB 3.0, and out of curiosity I just transferred a 7gb file to the drive. It maintained a steady 160mb/s, so something else is going on. I've had a lot of trouble with this motherboard and USB recently, so if it was a USB related issue, I'd see it too.

I'm guessing ED was pretty close with the cache limit, what types of files are you transferring?

 

[ihrsetrdr]

I'm guessing ED was pretty close with the cache limit, what types of files are you transferring?

All types, plain text, LibreOffice docs, PDFs, .jpgs, videos etc.

 

[freakdiablo]

All types, plain text, LibreOffice docs, PDFs, .jpgs, videos etc.

Ok, so a good chunk of them are smaller files. Not saying it can't be a USB 3 controller problem, but may just be an issue with sending a bunch of random writes to a spinner.

The video files, if they're larger (like 1GB+), try transferring one over on its own - if the transfer rate still drops below 20MB/s, then yeah the problem may lay elsewhere.

The mystical "12 hours later" edit: Just occured to me you can just try a CrystalDiskMark pass as well, as it'll break it down into sustained transfers and random access.

If it does turn out to be an issue with bad random access times, only solution i thought of is adding everything to one massive archive and then transferring it. Only downside is, you'd have to unpack it, so it's a "pay the toll now or later" case.