What are your HD transfer speeds?

[nedjinski]

I have 3 hard drives on my system. 2 SATA internal and 1 eSATA. No matter which drives I transfer data to / from the average transfer rates are around 50 M Bits / Sec. It seems that the xfer rates should be much higher. It also seems that the slowness is on the motherboard and not the drives themselves.

Any thoughts on slow HD perfomance.

GA EP45 UD3R
Q6600
G. Skill 4GB
HD #1 - WD Black 1TB
HD #2 - Samsung 500GB
HD #3 - WD My Book Home 1 TB eSATA

[dbee]

My WD Black 500 starts off around 90-95 and levels off averaging 70 mb/s.

I know this dont apply but just have to throw it in, Intel SSD80GB G2 reads 260 mb/s in CrystalDisk and 240/ Hdtune.

Dont forget that that while transferring data you are also WRITING. 50/mb isn't bad.

[Psycho101]

As dbee says, run a couple of propper benchmarks to assess the performance of your drives.

The industry standard for advertised read/write speeds is ATTO. Download and run it in turn on each drive.

As dbee says, if you're copying from one folder/partition to another on the same drive then the HDD is working doubly hard as it has to read and write, seeking, accessing and reading, seeking accessing then writing etc etc.

There are also differences in peak sequential read/write and sustained read/write to take into consideration. Plus if transferring many small files, the usage pattern can be a mix of sequential and random reads/writes. To put that into perspective, my WD Caviar Blue can write sequentially at 120MB/s toward the start of the disk, ~70MB at the end of the disk for an average of around 90-95MB/s. It can only randomly 4K write at 1.6MB/s.

Here's a shot of what *roughly* to expect from a WD caviar Blue. Black transfer rates will be higher where more buffering comes into play due to the 32MB of cache compared to the WD Blue's 16MB.