# Exernal hard drives and file transfer rate



## Good24 (May 7, 2015)

There have been a few threads on this but nothing that gets to my precise issue.

I have decided to keep backing up photos on various external hard drives. The wisdom of this can be debated separately but suffice to say I'm satisfied with my strategy for now, I keep one at my office for location redundancy.

What I am wondering is what's the latest technology in external hard drives and the cables that connect them? I am used to a USB. My desktop computer only has USB inputs (I think). Is a thunderbolt or FireWire to USB going to be any faster? Right now I am copying 62 GBs of photos and looks like it's going to take 1 hour and 15 minutes (using an older Lacie 500GB drive with standard USB cable). Yet the new Lacie drives boast 5 GB/second. Do people really realize those speeds? I'm sitting here for 75 minutes and supposedly it could be done in 13 seconds. Just wondering what combination of computer input (e.g. USB 2.0, USB 3.0, FireWire, Thunderbolt, etc.) coupled with what type of external drive, you might have experienced and what type of real speeds you are getting. This is about transferring from computer drive to external, or external to external drive, not about transfer rates from a card in a camera. Thanks!


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## Jim Saunders (May 7, 2015)

USB 3.0 is fast enough. It might be difficult to add to a laptop as they tend to have few expansion options but a PCI-e to USB 3.0 card for a desktop is easy enough. Thunderbolt might go a bit faster but you'd need an external drive fast enough to exploit it, and you'd give up the convenience of being able to plug it into nearly anything.

I have a couple of WD My Passport Wireless devices and like them just fine.

Jim


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## dcm (May 7, 2015)

I use a similar strategy. It depends on what you have available to you and what you are willing to upgrade. 

All three interfaces (FW, TB, USB 3.0) can be significantly faster than USB 2.0, but you have to have the interface on your drive/enclosure and desktop. I have a Mac Mini with USB 3.0 ports and now use bare drives in an external USB 3.0 enclosure so I can upgrade the drives independent of everything else. I also use a small USB 3.0 enclosure for external SSDs. 

You have lots of choices depending on budget, but be aware that not all implementations are equal. Some chip sets do not perform as well as others so you might read the comments closely on anything you consider. And there's lots of misleading specsmanship - some of the higher performance is only possible in a RAID configuration reading from multiple drives simultaneously, not so useful for your backup strategy. Some stress the interface speeds that are possible, not the actual throughput with drives. While USB 3.0 interface may be capable of 5Gb/sec, current drives will never achieve that.

Upgrading the interface isn't the only issue, your drives must be capable of higher speeds as well and are usually still the limiting factor. My WD Passport (USB 3.0) portable drives are half the speed of the WD Green drives, which are slower than the WD Blue, Red, and Black drives. The WD Green drives are the slowest and use the least power so you can use them with a cheap adapter/enclosure while the black drives run pretty hot for the fast performance so you'll need a enclosure with a good fan to use them. I settled on 3Tb WD Red NAS drives for good performance, less power/heat, and better reliability (MTBF). 

It's been a while since I benchmarked the different options - I think the WD passport was around 50Mb/sec, the WD Green around 90Mb/sec, Red around 110Mb/sec, Black around 150Mb/sec, and my Samsung SSDs around 400Mb/sec in single drive configurations - all of which are well below the interface speeds. 

You might try Black Magic's Disk Speed Test to benchmark your current performance. I saw a significant performance improvement when I switched from USB 2.0 to TB enclosures. There was little difference between the TB and USB 3.0 enclosures - the drive performance becomes the limiting factor, not the interface.


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## Halfrack (May 7, 2015)

Technically we'd need more info as to your computer to tell you what's specifically could be changed to make it go faster. Generally speaking, USB2 is ok, but it's still slow. USB3 is a lot faster to the same drive, so check and see if you have a blue usb3 port (the black ones are generally usb2).


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## Joe M (May 7, 2015)

Halfrack said:


> Technically we'd need more info as to your computer to tell you what's specifically could be changed to make it go faster.



That's about it. So far we know you have usb only and likely usb2.0. I have a few externals that can be connected via eSATA and that's supposed to be quick but I've never used them that way. I've been content to transfer at usb3 speeds and keep my drives hot swappable instead.


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## Dekaner (May 7, 2015)

Also, be careful when reading the specs, as there is a difference between gigabytes per second and gigabits per second. 8 bits to a byte.

Here is a quick article on USB2.0 vs 3.0 speeds and hard drives, including bits vs. bytes.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2360306/usb-3-0-speed-real-and-imagined.html


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## tolusina (May 7, 2015)

Does your desktop have a spare 5.25" Bay, as in, optical drive slot?
If so, one of these will fit right in, connects to the SATA bus internally, accepts any SATA 2.5" or 3.5" HDD or SSD or any combination of one each 2.5" & 3.5" at the same time





http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817998185


It has a front panel power switch, I leave a back up drive in place, power it on only to update the backups or retrieve a file. 
It's obviously as fast as internal SATA allows.


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## Mt Spokane Photography (May 7, 2015)

USB 2.0 is as slow as molasses and pretty much worthless for saving large amounts of data in a reasonable time. Firewire is no better.

USB 3, Thunderbolt, and e-sata will do the job. A GB Ethernet will also far outdo USB 2.

With a laptop, your options may be pretty limited. You cannot make those ports go faster by using a USB3 to USB 2 adapter. You will still get USB 2 speeds.

The Hard drive can also be a factor. some of the external Drives used a internal disk that was glacially slow, but most of the newer ones will zip right along. I bought a USB 3 external drive to upgrade my old USB 2 drive, the difference is amazing. What used to take 5 minutes now takes a few seconds.


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## FTb-n (May 8, 2015)

Jim Saunders said:


> USB 3.0 is fast enough. It might be difficult to add to a laptop as they tend to have few expansion options but a PCI-e to USB 3.0 card for a desktop is easy enough. Thunderbolt might go a bit faster but you'd need an external drive fast enough to exploit it, and you'd give up the convenience of being able to plug it into nearly anything.
> 
> I have a couple of WD My Passport Wireless devices and like them just fine.
> 
> Jim


+1
I use laptops with USB 3.0 ports and the portable WD Passport drives. I also have both WD and Seagate external drives (bigger housing with separate transformers). But, the Passports are so cheap and may (repeat "may") have better protection against head crashes from bumps when not in use.

USB 3.0 is plenty fast. My events can range from a few hundred to a couple thousand images and it might be 10-20 minutes to transfer the latter. I don't keep track of exact time any more.

One thing that I have noticed is that Windows machines can only talk quickly with one USB 3.0 device at a time. If you have two USB 3.0 drives connected to two USB 3.0 ports, the priority is placed on the first port used for transfer. The second is scaled back to USB 2.0 speeds. I always back up to two drives and do the backups one at a time.


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## Otara (May 8, 2015)

62gb in an hour or so is pretty much max usb2 speeds. With USB3 it can be about 3-5 times faster, ie 10-15 minutes instead. 

So no it wont be like 10 seconds at 5GB/sec as covered by earlier explanations, but its fairly worthwhile.


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## Zeidora (May 8, 2015)

62 GB >1 hour is excessive. Should be a few minutes on USB3 or a bit faster on thunderbolt (~10% faster than USB3). I use thunderbolt drive for my primary disk on a new MacPro, and deep archive is on separate RAID1 with USB3. As others have said, you also need the right connection on your computer. For fastest write speeds, you need a RAID0 flavor, and then possibly also a dedicated RAID controller board. That is mainly for video editing; for photos, it is overkill.


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## LDS (May 8, 2015)

Good24 said:


> What I am wondering is what's the latest technology in external hard drives and the cables that connect them?



Beware that some advertised speeds are "pure wire speed" and may not be the real speed you can achieve because there are usually some overheads due to transfer protocol designs (error detection and corretion, etc.) and other devices in the chain speed that may actually deliver a lower speed.

There are several factors that concur to the actual transfer speed:


Type of interfaces (USB2/3, Thunderbolt, e-Sata, etc.)
Quality of the hardware devices, and what features are really supported (and how well...)
OS/driver support for that type of interface (i.e. USB 3.0 has specific features for disks transfers, needs to be supported, see UASP - http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/usb-3-uas-turbo,3215.html)
Drive interface speed (SATA, SAS, etc.) and controller speed and cache
Drive speed (rpm for rotating disks) and buffer cache
Drive array architecture (single drive, RAID, ecc.)
File system type (FAT, NTFS, ext3/4, ZFS, ecc.

When backing up to disk, "pure speed" is a factor, but not may be the most important one. What you want, are reliable transfer and reliable storage on disk.

All of the above factors have an impact both on transfer speed and reliability. Sometimes, better reliability may mean a trade-off with transfer speed. For example FAT is a very fast file system, but has little or no protection if there is a power failure or system crash. "Journaled" file systems like NTFS or ext4 may recover from such errors, but it makes them somewhat slower.

Pure disk speeds matters, also - you can't expect a slow disk to keep up with higher transfer rates it can't handle. Also, with rotating disk speed decreases with the distance from the disk center. While being able to write to several disks at once may increase speed (and reliability, with the proper setup), or decrease write speeds in some setups (i.e. RAID5).

Depending on your needs you have to match all those pieces needed to achive the speed you aim to, within your budget, and physical environment.


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## Tinky (May 8, 2015)

Even if you had striped Multi SSD raids going through thunderbolt, your transfer will only be as fast as the drive you are transferring from.

If its an internal 5400 or 7200rpm you are going to max out at something like 120mb/s, less if that drive also happens to be running the OS and other apps.

I found my lacie d2,s good for about 50mb/s, limited by the controller interface, the fasted port was fw800 with top working rate of about 80mb/s on a good day, with the wind behind it going downhill.

I rejuventated my 9 year old macbook pro with a new drive, pswitching from a hitaci 100gb 7200 to an owc sata2 ssd.
The drive is good for about 240mb/s but the interface on my macbook is Sata1, so restricted to around 150mb/s, still boots faster than my windoze 8 netbook.

My old office macpro had a software raid array, 2x seagate barracudas, giving me a measured rate of around 240mb/s, not bad for spinning platters at all, but I also ran the os off f a third internal drive. Although sata2, the discs were the factor here, and barracudas are about the fastest hdds without spending daft money.

So lots of bottlenecks, the killer ips going to be that you can only go as fast as the source disk in your transfer can chuck the data out, no matter how goid the connection or destination drive.


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## Haydn1971 (May 8, 2015)

I'd reverse the question and ask, why do you need to back up 62GB of data ? Is this something you do daily ?

Or are you archiving 62GB ?

My workflow involves cutting down my regular backups to just a few MB's, I archive my new photos onto my eSTA external raid box keeping the most recent years on my local data drive. I then back up my archive onto a USB3 Passport device and store offsite. The key is reducing what you copy regular and maximising your copies in places that couldn't disappear in one action - I'm currently safe upto a nuke attack on Sheffield, but then I'd probably not be worried about my photos !


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## Good24 (May 8, 2015)

Thanks for all the thoughts and advice. My USB outlets on my computer (Dell XPS 8700) are indeed blue and just for good measure I looked up the specs and all the USB ports are 3.0. As I read the comments and thought through the issue I double checked my Lacie hard drive - it's actually USB 2.0 (as mentioned it's an older drive). And in fact the other external drive from which I was transferring files is also 2.0 (swore it was 3.0 but looked it up again and it's not). So, that seems to be the culprit here. 

And the consensus here seems to be, if nothing else 3.0 is a marked improvement over 2.0. Since I have the main component (the computer) satisfied I guess I'll need to ensure I get USB 3.0 drives going forward, hopefully that helps. I agree with the comment that even if I could get extra speed from a Thunderbolt or other device (which sounds debatable) there is a downside in lacking the universality of USB ports. 

The 62 GBs is from the past 4 mos. of shooting (first baby - so this is an anomaly in terms of the high volume) and I try to do this backup a few times a year. 

In terms of reliability of the external drive itself, do people think an SSD external (like a Samsung) is a vast improvement over say a Western Digital (non-SSD)? assuming other things being equal e.g. they are both using a USB 3.0.


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## LDS (May 8, 2015)

Haydn1971 said:


> I'd reverse the question and ask, why do you need to back up 62GB of data ? Is this something you do daily ?



From time to time, you should check backups - they may become silently corrupted. The only way is to read them and see if they are readable, or compare to actual data, if possible. It means to be able to read large data sets.


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