DescentBB

So I have been backing up my server, and I have noticed that my USB speeds are going at around 11 Megabytes a second to my spare Terabyte hard drive, that speed seems rather slow then it should be, or is it right and it just seems slower? I am copying on windows 7 64 bit, copying files from my server to my desktop that is running RAID 0 and then to the external 1 TB drive.

How big are the files being copied? Smaller files will slow down a USB drive a bit, 11 MB/sec is still well into USB2.0 territory though (USB 1.1 tops out at 1 MB/sec). The theoretical limit of USB2.0 is a bit over 40 MB/sec, but one is lucky to hit half that.

It ranges from a few meg files, like my MP3 and I am also doing my Movies, 1-2 GB on those and my game ISO collection, 500 MB - 8 GB on those files.

try using xcopy from the command prompt.

a good chunk what takes time is updating the progress dialog.

A good disk should run at about 20+MB/s via USB 2.0 high speed.

So just to give a update on this, I hooked the drive to my work provided Macbook, and I got even slower writes to it, and then I took the drive out of the external enclosure. And used a SATA to USB adapter, got about the same performance on that. Formated exFat, NTFS, or HFS it didn't matter. Then I connected it directly to the SATA ports on my mobo, got the same performance, but on boot now I am getting SMART Error on that drive.

I just want to confirm 1 last thing before I submit a RMA for the drive, having my mobo setup for RAID shouldn't cause a SMART Error should it? Currently I have two 320 GB drives in RAID 0. And having that setup shouldn't cause the SMART error or a performance hit would it?

Here is the hard drive and the mobo.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813130254

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822145304

If you have a RAID set up, and the drive is a member of an array then SMART will be disabled on it and shouldn't show up at all.

However if the drive is connected to the RAID controller, but not actually a member of any array (just a single drive) then SMART should still work and report problems. It sounds like you have it set up as a single drive so I would go ahead and RMA it. You could use speedfan to check the SMART status over inside windows if you want, but getting an error on bootup and seeing that kind of slow performance when its on a native port is generally a good enough indicator.