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Best external hard drive transfer speeds

I

Itzmemark

macrumors member
Original poster
Mar 4, 2012
70
0
I currently have a time capsule that I back up via Ethernet but I feel it is so slow. Given it backs up a whole lot more data but I feel my FireWire 800 transfers data much faster. So I know thunderbolt will be the fastest I would still like to be able to hook it up to my girls computer which does not have it. So regarding USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 vs Ethernet which one will I get the best speeds thanx in advance.
 
USB 2.0 offers up to 37 MB/s read/write speeds during peaks, USB 3.0 offers more than that, but as I don't have one to test, I can't offer a real number.
Many tests I came upon during a quick search didn't show that much faster transfer speeds, one even had results of 26.2 MB/s (10 GB in 6m31s).
Gigabit Ethernet usually transfers at 75 to 100 MB/s (sometimes more), if the HDD permits it and the protocols are properly implemented.
Firewire 800 offers 65 to 75 MB/s.
eSATA offers almost the full speed of the HDD (100+ MB/s for 7200 RPM 3.5" S-ATA HDDs).
 
So I guess the Ethernet is the fastest guess it just feels slower to me thanx
 
Itzmemark said:
So I guess the Ethernet is the fastest guess it just feels slower to me thanx
Click to expand...

Have you actually benchmarked the speed (copied 10 GB of data in a big file (transfers faster) or several (very) small files (transfers slower) and timed it) to get an actual MB/s count?
 
Itzmemark said:
So I guess the Ethernet is the fastest guess it just feels slower to me thanx
Click to expand...

What you're seeing can be explained easily. The problem is your time capsule itself. It’s pretty slow compared to other NAS solutions. It has nothing to do with the connection to the time capsule. It’s the hard drive controller inside it that's limiting how fast the data can be written.

Anandtech put in various hard drives into the time capsule to find out the maximum speeds that it could achieve

anandtech said:
but performance seems capped to around 40MB/s. Obviously the Vertex 3 can write way faster than this, but the controller seems to be strained to the limit when making writes. This is a bit frustrating considering mostly what the device is going to be doing is writing stuff to disk every couple of hours.
Click to expand...

Connecting a hard drive via firewire 800 will indeed be faster than a time capsule, no matter how you connect the time capsule.
 
theSeb said:
What you're seeing can be explained easily. The problem is your time capsule itself. It’s pretty slow compared to other NAS solutions. It has nothing to do with the connection to the time capsule. It’s the hard drive controller inside it that's limiting how fast the data can be written.

Anandtech put in various hard drives into the time capsule to find out the maximum speeds that it could achieve



Connecting a hard drive via firewire 800 will indeed be faster than a time capsule, no matter how you connect the time capsule.
Click to expand...

Ah, thanks, I was suspecting something like this, but wasn't sure and too lazy to look.
 
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