WD my passport drive slow

R

ronin99

Active member
I'm using a cheap consumer off the shelf drive to store some files.
I wasn't expecting blazing speed out of this thing but it is incredibly slow.

It's usb 3 and I checked it with BMD disk speed and it is reading and writing at 1.1mb,
that is ridiculous, is there a defect in these drives?
 
Also, you say the drive is USB 3.0, but what about the computer? Does it have USB 3.0 ports? And if so, is the drive connected to one of them? My computer has both USB 2.0 and 3.0 ports, so if I have a 3.0 device, I have to make sure to connect it to one of the 3.0 ports. Obviously if your computer doesn't have USB 3.0 ports, then you're not going to get USB 3.0 performance, even if the drive is 3.0. That being said, the performance you are getting is way, way below what even USB 2.0 should deliver.
 
Like I answered on Reduser.net:

these type of drives give you 125MB/s new and around 85MB/s when 3/4 full.

In the OP's case, something is broken/not right.
 
Think of it like plumbing. You can only get so much water through a pipe of a certain diameter, and you'll be limited by the narrowest pipe in the whole sequence. If you're lucky you can swap out that bottleneck or find the clog and clear it.
As David pointed out, make sure your computer even has USB 3.0, then make sure you're connected to it. Make sure the cable is a 3.0 cable. Is the drive powered?
How is your drive formatted? Is it compatible with your system? Do you have some wacky permissions or security setup? Is it doing a redundant write like a RAID?
A couple things you can't fix are the speed of the drive and what kind of cache it has, but these are smaller factors.
 
I'd say speeds like 25-40MB/s would be some light "issue" or some overlooked misconfiguration.

But 1MB/s is faulty—one way or another.
 
I assume you've tried every port to make sure it's not a USB bus issue? If so, repair utilities are in order. And if that doesn't do it, you have an outright defect. I use those same drives sometimes, and while they have a lot of problems they don't have those kinds of problems. Although one of mine tends to jump between almost 0 and it's normal speed when copying.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top