I have a 500 gig western digital mybook external hard drive. its really slow. while writing to it from the internal hard drive in my vista laptop over usb 2 it averages around 6-12 mb/s. this seems really slow to me. So am i crazy or is this really slow? i have it formatted in ntfs with 3 different partitions. I would appreciate any suggestions on how to speed it up. Thanks.
it's USB. I get about 35MB/s with my firewire 400 drive. you're not really suppose to partition External HDD's btw. May I ask why you did?.
Why arent you supposed to partition an external drive? and i did thinking that i might install alternate os's on them and its much easier to do a clean install if you have multiple partitions so you dont have to lose all ur data. I keep all my music and documents and such on a seperate partition from my os. i am pretty confident that the usb settings are correct tho i will check again. thanks
WTF are you installing an OS on a USB drive for??? Am I the only one that thinks this is a stupid idea? Here is my point. USB drives are meant for storage that's it. or the little things. Not installing OS's & getting insane read write speeds for applications/games. 20MB/s is about the max I've seen a USB drive do. Those partitions may be slowing down your read/write speeds as well.
Thats totaly incorrect. When I first decided to try linux out I installed it on my external usb drive. This way, linux fiddled nothing with my other windows drives. The bootloader was on that drive and I was happy with that. Speed was never an issue. A friend of mine had the issue with an lappy of his a year ago. It seems that the usb ports were capped for some reason and no bios update helped. He ended up returning that (was an Acer) and got a Toshiba instead. Now, another friend of mine has the exact same lappy and 2 of his usb ports work with full bandwidth and the other 2 dont. He however he didnt mind, used the 2 faster ports. Having multiple partitions has nothing to do with the problem you got. Try the drive on another puter, if it works normal there, its prolly your lappy thats causing it.
I dint mention that in regard to the speed issue, but in regard of the partitioning and installing os'es on external drives comment. External drives are ideal with testing out other os's. That is, if youre lazy(like me ) to get a propper hd popped into your puter and dig deeper into the matter. However, I did give him advice and my experience with the speed issues at hand.
Your suggestion about his ports may be correct. But seriously. I would never install an OS on a USB drive for regular use. Maybe a USB flash drive, but not a bus powered/external powered HD.
^ Edit, yeah I read your post a little closer. I guess some people just have fun installing linux distros on really slow hard drives.
Yeah, the speed was acceptable, learning how to use the system was more of an issue. I guess it was acceptable in the 80'ties. :nerd: Sorry for going wayyyy off topic.
It's not that way off I was just wondering why someone would need to partition a storage drive. I'm not a noob or anything I just have never had the need to do this. If I partition a drive it's usually gonna be my internal drive. I have always found read/write speeds slightly slower on a partitioned drive. So hence my suggestion.
Well, my external drive was(still is) a 40GB 2.5" and ofc didnt partition it, but rather used the whole drive. I guess its better to use the external drive if you dont have much invaluable data on it and/or space for another partition to try out things like I did. That is if you only have one(logical) intearnal drive and youre reluctant to fiddle with it and end up with your "usual" os not booting up or data loss and whatnot(like ppl wanting to try out a new os, and installing it on the wrong partition, sth happens). But, its like you said, partitioning would only slightly affect the speeds. Again, sorry for my need to be thorough... :nerd:
aright thanks for the suggestions. Yea i wasnt planning on putting a regularly used os on my external drive. Primarily i was thinking about trying to put osx on it which is much easier to do on an external drive. Then i also considered testing other os's like windows 7 and linux. However i havent had any time. being in college with a girlfriend in another town makes spare time rare so my drive has been primarily for backup. I agree one partition would be better for this use. Thats an interesting point about the ports being limited. that doesnt seem to be the case with mine. at least not that some ports are faster. i suppose they may all be limited. I guess that i will just live with the slower speeds (after more testing i have learned that they arent as bad as i had initially thought). and maybe if i get time reformat into one partition. thanks for the suggestions
If it is still under warranty you sure have the right to complain about it(the lappy I mean). Also, please do try the external drive on another computer for comparison. Further more, if someone you know also has an external drive, you could mby test how that one works. You know, just to isolate on what side the problem lies. Good luck.
is the external HDD a 5400 RPM or 7200 RPM?if it's 5400 RPM then that is why it is slow but also are your USB ports 2.0 or the older USB 1.1 or 1.0?if they are USB 1x then thats another reason for it being slow. also how much of a data buffer does it have?most have 2MB which is not enough even for an external HDD.
At 12MB/s it couldn't be USB 1.1 as that's rated at 12mbit/s (1.5MB/s). USB drives are just burdened with high overhead (USB's design is to blame for this) and typically just use slower drives because even if you somehow were able to reach USB 2.0's maximum theoretical bandwidth of 480mbit/s that's still a miserly 60MB/s, better for sure, but still far lower than eSATA or internal drives. Reaching that level is highly unlikely though. The best sustained read I've had via USB has been in the 35MB/s range but 25MB/s is far more typical for instance. Firewire has lower overhead which is why even though it is rated at only 400mbit/s it typically is more responsive and faster than USB 2.0 for things like external hard drives.