Slow transfer speed to/from external USB/Firewire hard drive

[Mark Huebner]

I recently bought a Western Digital 200Gb, 7200rpm hard drive and put it in
an external Oxford 911 drive enclosure (Triumph Venus 3.5" aluminum). I did
some transfer speed tests and found out that the firewire is about 35-70%
faster than USB 2.0. However, the transfer rates I'm getting on the
firewire port are in the range 16-23 Mbytes/sec. This seems a little
disappointing since the hard drive is capable of transfer rates of 100
Mbytes/sec and the firewire max is about 40Mbytes/sec. Do I have a lemon or
are these normal transfer rates for this type of external enclosure? If
this is normal, why is it so much less than both the firewire max rate and
the hard drive max rate? Is there a better external enclosure that I should
consider?

 

[CWatters]

This review of a USB 2.0 drive also includes the test of a few other
firewire devices.

http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage/20030116/

 

[idunno]

I recently bought a Western Digital 200Gb, 7200rpm hard drive and put it in
an external Oxford 911 drive enclosure (Triumph Venus 3.5" aluminum). I did
some transfer speed tests and found out that the firewire is about 35-70%
faster than USB 2.0. However, the transfer rates I'm getting on the
firewire port are in the range 16-23 Mbytes/sec. This seems a little
disappointing since the hard drive is capable of transfer rates of 100
Mbytes/sec and the firewire max is about 40Mbytes/sec. Do I have a lemon or
are these normal transfer rates for this type of external enclosure? If
this is normal, why is it so much less than both the firewire max rate and
the hard drive max rate? Is there a better external enclosure that I should
consider?

The Western Digital is not capable of 100MB/sec. The ATA Bus is max
100MB/sec (minus overhead) not the drive. Don't expect transfers at
the file level to be anywhere near the bus speed or the maximal values
extracted from the low-level measuments cited below.

http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200210/20021018WD2000xB_2.html


It is to be expected that the firewire connection is faster than the
USB2 and may be slower than ATA100. Just get 100 MB/sec transfers out
of your mind. they do not yet exist in a single drive context.