USB2 External Hardrive transfer rates

[djkemp1]

hi all,

i have bought a external usb2 hard drive.

i did some read speed tests and all of them seem to give an average of about 30 - 33 MB/s

is this correct?

when i tested my SATA interal driver i get about 70MB/s for Linear reads then buffered read nearl 200mb/s

so why does this new drive cap at about 30MB/s?? is that the maximum speed USB2 can deliever?

[optimus_prime]

well i don't think it's theoretical maximum, but it sounds like pretty normal speed for usb2 drive, not that i've benchmarked any lately :)

[djkemp1]

ok so my drive is working at the fastest speed?

will there be any downsides to this, could i say run programs etc or games from that drive?

[optimus_prime]

well why would you do that? :) if you want to use drive for gaming put one into machine and get normal speeds. use external drive for storage and transfer of files between boxes.

[djkemp1]

thank you, but would it be feasible to run a program etc from the drive? or would it just be too sluggish?

[optimus_prime]

well try it, i don't know what program are you talking about :)

overall performance will suffer while reading and writing to external drive, so startup is bound to be sluggish, after that small stuff that doesn't do much i/o will perform as usual, and big stuff like games will be slow.

as i said, i would use it for music, movies and stuff, yes you can run programs of it but it doesn't make sense to implement such a bottleneck into your system :)

[djkemp1]

thanks for the help

[marcelodamian]

the real speed is not the same! its a fact!...

[munaaf]

dont know why it does not go faster, but here i have similar speeds when I transfer data between usb devices which are 2.0 so i guess hail usb 3.0!!! hehe cnt wait for it