USB 3.0 Different Speeds on my PC

[MultiMigo]

I have a 1TB 5400 RPM Drive. I have it on an Orico USB 3.0 Enclosure

 

I copied a 2GB video file from that 5400rpm drive to my internal 7200rpm drive, plugged it in the USB 3.0 port, speeds were around 28MB/s

 

I tried it the other way around. Copied the same 2GB file from my internal 7200rpm drive to the external 5400rpm drive on a 3.0 enclosure and I got 100MB/s

 

Can anyone explain this to me? Thanks

[8uhbbhu8]

33 minutes ago, MultiMigo said:

I have a 1TB 5400 RPM Drive. I have it on an Orico USB 3.0 Enclosure

 

I copied a 2GB video file from that 5400rpm drive to my internal 7200rpm drive, plugged it in the USB 3.0 port, speeds were around 28MB/s

 

I tried it the other way around. Copied the same 2GB file from my internal 7200rpm drive to the external 5400rpm drive on a 3.0 enclosure and I got 100MB/s

 

Can anyone explain this to me? Thanks

Read and write speeds are different for every drive as well as the read and write on each drive never being the same. Reads will almost always be faster then writes as well.

 

A 5400 rpm drive will generally be slower at everything then a 7200 rpm drive due to the nature of the speeds the platters rotate at meaning it takes more time to get to the spot where the data it needs is. There are exceptions as drives get better but this is the general case.

 

In terms of writing and reading speeds, all a drive has to do to find what it needs is lookup where the info is and then copy that to ram and then what ever it is copying to. Writing it has to find a designated empty spot on the drive to write, plot that location and what data is going there, Read the data from the ram, and then finally write it to the disk.

 

Here's another good explanation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive_performance_characteristics

 

[Mira Yurizaki]

For a discrepancy this big, I'm going guess one of two things since 5,400 or 7,200 RPM shouldn't cause a performance difference like this on its own.

• When copying from the external to the internal drive, the file may have been fragmented. Going the other way, the file may have not been and was also writing to continuous space.
• The file was in cache on the transfer back, but this is unlikely since 2GB is larger than most caches save for hybrid drives and hybrid drives usually aren't 7,200 RPM nor would they cache a file that was just received.