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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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    Could it be a driver issue - ie is it possible you have 2 different USB chipsets, or bios settings which are forcing port 1 to behave a USB2 rather then USB3? – davidgo Jun 24 '16 at 08:34
  • Make sure you installed the XHCI driver from Intel (since you're using Windows 7), otherwise the host controller might fall back to EHCI mode. – Tom Yan Jun 24 '16 at 18:24
  • @TomYan Thanks, is there a way to check whether the controller uses XHCI or EHCI? I did install the USB 3 driver, I updated the question to mention it. – Franck Dernoncourt Jun 24 '16 at 23:32
  • @davidgo On the laptop, two USB ports are USB 2, and two USB ports are USB 3. – Franck Dernoncourt Jun 24 '16 at 23:36
  • @davidgo I check the BIOS settings, they look ok to me, I added a screenshot in the question details. – Franck Dernoncourt Jun 24 '16 at 23:45
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    Perhaps you should try to [latest version](https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/21129/) of the driver – Tom Yan Jun 25 '16 at 00:16
  • @TomYan Thanks, it did improve quite a bit: http://i.stack.imgur.com/leKa1.png However, still far from 90-130MB/s, where it is supposed to be from what I read ([example](http://superuser.com/a/607007/116475)). – Franck Dernoncourt Jun 25 '16 at 00:43
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    activate the WriteCache for he drives in device manager – magicandre1981 Jun 25 '16 at 06:23
  • @magicandre1981 Thanks, good idea, I have just tried but it didn't help – Franck Dernoncourt Jun 26 '16 at 01:45
  • Perhaps the Seagate drive supports UASP but not the two WD drives? *How* does the Seagate drive show in Device Manager? – Tom Yan Jul 05 '16 at 07:33
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    Also, I just notice that the Seagate drive is basically empty while the two WD drives are close to being full. That's not really a fair test, especially to a spinning drive and if it is highly fragmented. – Tom Yan Jul 05 '16 at 07:35
  • @TomYan Thanks, good point, I added more content on the Seagate and did the benchmark again: it does decrease the performances significantly but not as worse as WD. Maybe it is less fragmented indeed. How to check whether Seagate drive supports UASP? – Franck Dernoncourt Jul 05 '16 at 15:49
  • Well the disk will show up as "SCSI disk" instead of "USB device" under disk drives in device manager. Also the controller will show up as a UAS controller under storage controller instead of USB mass storage under USB devices – Tom Yan Jul 05 '16 at 15:58

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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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  • Thanks, shouldn't we expect a higher IO given that they are 5400 RPM? On my side, I've had ~8 WD, no failure so far, which is indeed quite surprising. I did have some Seagate and Lacie EHD failed. Everything is backed up in a local RAID 5 NAS + online when non sensitive. Also, I am surprised that one USB 3 port is twice slower than the other USB 3 port. – Franck Dernoncourt Jun 24 '16 at 07:59
  • Standard speeds for HDDs are 5400RPM or 7200RPM. So your HDDs have actually the *lower* speed. Also, speed can slow down even more if you're trying to read or write many files spread everywhere on the disk's pysical surface. And sorry about ranting about disk failures ^^ but it's true only WD disks have failed me so far. – Nathan.Eilisha Shiraini Jun 24 '16 at 08:05
  • I added in the question a benchmark of a Seagate (5400 RPM), as you'll see read and write speed are 130 MB/s. – Franck Dernoncourt Jun 26 '16 at 21:50