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I have approximately 1.5 TB of data which I need to back-up on an external hard drive. I am using a brand new 2 TB Seagate OneTouch HDD portable storage device with a USB 3.0 cable.

Currently, the expected transfer time is over 45 hours and climbing.

Maybe my math is wrong but 1.5 TB at 600 MBps using a USB 3.0 cable should only take about 45 minutes, right? Even if I was just using a USB 2.0 cable with 60 MBps, it still shouldn't take much more than 7 hours.

What's the issue here and is there some solution?

sawdust
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Darcy
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  • What kind of data? Lots of tiny files or one big file? – Mokubai Jun 07 '21 at 20:26
  • Lots of files. Just a full computer back-up more-or-less. – Darcy Jun 07 '21 at 20:34
  • Lots of tiny files is the worse case scenario and will always take a lot longer than one big file. That said what you report doesn't seem right. OTOH your expectations are also unrealistic. The USB3.0 connection isn't a bottleneck like USB2.0 but inside there's still a crappy 5400rpm Seagate 2.5" HDD. An average read of 85MB/s and even slower writes is what you should expect. – ChanganAuto Jun 07 '21 at 21:05
  • Is it definitely the HDD version and not the SSD version? Does it have a model number on it? – Mokubai Jun 07 '21 at 21:16
  • If you're copying file by file, then see this answer: https://superuser.com/questions/344534/why-does-copying-the-same-amount-of-data-take-longer-if-spread-across-many-separ/344860#344860 BTW up/down-loading is a network concept. There's no network connection to an external USB drive. – sawdust Jun 07 '21 at 23:27

1 Answers1

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USB3 is not going to be able to make up for a cheap and awful 2.5" HDD.

Those drives were pretty bad at the best of times and could probably manage 60-100MB/s at peak on a single solid transfer, for random seeks on small files they will literally drop down to single digit MB/s rates.

Have a look at the images for Seagate Backup drives at Anandtech. Note that these are for supposed "good" drives. When you get down to millions of tiny 4K reads the drive will spend a massive amount of time seeking, reading, seeking again, reading, maybe writing, and seeking a few more times for good measure. When copying tiny files the area you care about is looking at the "4K" section of CrystalDiskMark:

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Which looks just awful. On top of the bad performance of the drive you are copying to, you may well have to contend with whatever performance you get from your source drive as well. If you are copying millions of tiny files from a 2.5" HDD to another 2.5" HDD then quite honestly you would have to have the patience of a saint.

If you create a single solid file using your favourite zipping tool and then copy that to the drive then you may well see the true transfer speed the drive is capable of.

Mokubai
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