Slow Transfer speeds to my external SSD

[NotBryson]

Howdy, so recently for black Friday I bought an external SSD (this one https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C9WHSZZN?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details&th=1 ) and I'm using a cable I already had (this one  https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01MZIPYPY/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o03_s00?ie=UTF8&th=1 ) to transfer some data off of my computer (current specs https://pcpartpicker.com/list/PbKQfy ) however I am only reaching speeds of up to 10 MB/s and sometimes dropping into speeds of a couple hundred kB/s. I am wondering If I'm doing something wrong or if there's any way to seed up the process as I have a lot of data to transfer, any help would be much appreciated, Thanks!

[YoungBlade]

What data are you transferring? You'll only see the peak 5Gbps (approximately 480MB/s) allowed by the cable when transferring large files. When transferring a bunch of small files, it's not uncommon to see drops into the KB/s range, as filesystem overhead and random IO performance become the limiting factors rather than SSD sequential write performance.

[NotBryson]

2 minutes ago, YoungBlade said:

What data are you transferring? You'll only see the peak 5Gbps (approximately 480MB/s) allowed by the cable when transferring large files. When transferring a bunch of small files, it's not uncommon to see drops into the KB/s range, as filesystem overhead and random IO performance become the limiting factors rather than SSD sequential write performance.

ohhh I see that's pretty interesting actually! but it makes sense, currently, it is a bunch of small files since I'm transferring over an emulator with a bunch of small retro games on it, the SSD did come with a small USB-C to USB-C cable which I don't have a port for on my computer(though I could order an adapter? but I feel like that would also impact performance), would that cable do better with smaller files or is that again just a consequence of dealing with moving gbs of small files

[YoungBlade]

2 minutes ago, NotBryson said:

ohhh I see that's pretty interesting actually! but it makes sense, currently, it is a bunch of small files since I'm transferring over an emulator with a bunch of small retro games on it, the SSD did come with a small USB-C to USB-C cable which I don't have a port for on my computer(though I could order an adapter? but I feel like that would also impact performance), would that cable do better with smaller files or is that again just a consequence of dealing with moving gbs of small files

A faster cable won't fix the IO/filesystem bottleneck. Even shucking the NVMe drive inside the enclosure and hooking it directly to the M.2 slot in your PC won't make it meaningfully faster.

 

You can think of the filesystem overhead as being like needing to put a label on each box you're putting into storage. It takes the same amount of time to write the label, regardless of whether the box is for a giant TV or it's a ring box. Making the door bigger can make it easier to put in a giant TV box, but it won't help you label and store ring boxes into the room any faster, because the labeling process itself is what's taking so long.

[NotBryson]

13 minutes ago, YoungBlade said:

A faster cable won't fix the IO/filesystem bottleneck. Even shucking the NVMe drive inside the enclosure and hooking it directly to the M.2 slot in your PC won't make it meaningfully faster.

 

You can think of the filesystem overhead as being like needing to put a label on each box you're putting into storage. It takes the same amount of time to write the label, regardless of whether the box is for a giant TV or it's a ring box. Making the door bigger can make it easier to put in a giant TV box, but it won't help you label and store ring boxes into the room any faster, because the labeling process itself is what's taking so long.

ahh okok gotcha! thanks a ton for the help and the info on how this stuff works on a deeper level I appreciate it!