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I have 2 Western Digital external hard drives, namely:

I connect them to my laptop (MSI G Series GE70 0ND-033US 17.3-Inch Laptop (Black/Red)), which runs Windows 7 SP1 x64 Ultimate.

The 2 Western Digital external hard drives are slow, and I don't understand why. I tried two different USB cables, and two different USB ports. All USB cables and USB ports are USB 3. All disks use NTFS.

Below are some CrystalDiskMark benchmarks:

WD My Passport Ultra with USB cable 1 USB port 1 (both USB cable and USB port are USB 3):

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WD Elements with USB cable 1 on USB port 1 (both USB cable and USB port are USB 3):

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WD Elements with USB cable 2 USB port 1 (both USB cable and USB port are USB 3):

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WD Elements with USB cable 2 USB port 2 (both USB cable and USB port are USB 3):

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In theory, everything is USB 3: the EHD, the cable, and the computer's USB port. According to HD Tune Pro 5.50, both EHD are healthy.

What could explain the slowness of the external hard drives?

I benchmarked the Seagate Backup Plus 4TB Portable External Hard Drive using the same computer, cable and USB port. It gives much better results:

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As a side note, it gives similar performances when formatted as exFAT:

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The EHD also has more settings regarding the write-caching policy:

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And its performances decrease as more content is added to the hard drive:

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Answer to comments:

I installed Intel's USB 3 drivers from the MSI website:

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BIOS settings:

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Updating the Intel USB 3 drivers improved quite a bit:

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Activating WriteCache from the device manager (then rebooting) doesn't help:

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Franck Dernoncourt
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1 Answers1

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First of all, remember your disks are mechanical disks, which means any time you wanna get data from it, a small part has to move to where the data actually is and wait for the disk to spin enough time for the data to be read.

I have a USB3 2TB Toshiba external HDD, and I don't have more than 30MiB/s read & write speed either.

Oh, and as a word of advice, avoid WD hard drives. I had several of them that stopped working for no real reason, without any way to fix them (and one of them was a My Passport).

Nathan.Eilisha Shiraini
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