Why are my transfer speeds so slow?

[hhamama66]

Recently purchased a bunch of WD red pro drives to set up as a raid array in windows storage spaces until I can afford to buy another computer to use as a NAS later this year. I chucked them all in a QNAP-TR004 direct attached storage device. After doing a little research both on this forum and r/dataHoarders I came to understand that any kind of software raid is risky from a driver and hardware standpoint. So many recommended to just use some kind of software raid and I ended up using Windows storage spaces because I pretty much have no other option with my current desktop. Luckily the QNAP device allows users to flip a few switches and set the drivers to individual so Windows can view all of them as individual disks. My question now is, what is causing my transfer speeds to be so slow? I'm trying to transfer from an internal WD Black 10 TB to 4 WD red pro 12 TB drives in a raid 5 array (Called parity option in storage spaces). So why is my write speed so low? Is it the DAS box that's bottlenecking transfer speed or was it simply a bad idea to use windows storage spaces altogether? Or is it a USB problem? I'm getting transfer speeds of at most 14 MB/s and as I understand it, USB 3 has a theoretical maximum speed of about 625 megabytes per second. Now I understand that realistically, USB devices are not going to reach the maximum, especially not hard drives but in practice shouldn't I be getting higher than 15 megabytes per second? I've attached a picture of the properties for both partitions as well as the CPU and drive usage from task manager.

[Kilrah]

Would bet on USB issues. Are you using a short cable like they say?

BIOS / chipset drivers up to date given the Ryzen USB issues?

[hhamama66]

1 hour ago, Kilrah said:

Would bet on USB issues. Are you using a short cable like they say?

BIOS / chipset drivers up to date given the Ryzen USB issues?

EDIT: it looks like my bios version is much older than  I realized. I have a file transfer still going on that I'll wait to finish before updating.

 

Here is a link to the cable I'm using. I know it looks like a cheap generic cable, but this one has been the best type c usb 3.1 cable I've been able to find. I've used it with my phone for large data transfers and for 25 watt fast charging (not relevant for external drives, but still it's a really high quality cable from my person experience).

 

I believe the last time I updated all the drivers was In October of last year. I'll double check the BIOS & chipset driver versions, but it can't be a USB issue because I've gotten much faster transfer speeds using the same exact cable with my phone. Also, transferring from the internal HD to an internal SSD has been much faster than this.

[hhamama66]

7 hours ago, Kilrah said:

Would bet on USB issues. Are you using a short cable like they say?

BIOS / chipset drivers up to date given the Ryzen USB issues?

Ok, updated chipset drivers and bios version to the latest stable release and I'm still getting bad transfer speeds. It starts off writing at 250 mbps then drops as low as 0 but for the most part hovers around 10mbps. Storage space usage us at 100% according to task manager. No idea what the hell is going on. Transferring from the array to the internal drive is even worse. It's stuck at 5 mbps. Either the problem is this drive box or i made a big mistake using storage spaces.