Poor transfer speed on USB 3.0 External hard drive

[klinsmann]

My friend gave me his 500GB external usb hard drive. It is a seagate hard disk. There are around 150GB of videos on it. Also there are games and wallpapers. I am trying to copy them but it takes too much time. I had connected the drive at the front side. It is a usb 3.0 drive. And the speed is very slow. It is around 3 to 7 mb/s. It will take long time to copy everything.

[Gaganvihari]

There can be some issue with the front port. Connect the drive on the backside of your system. There are additional usb ports. Connect on it and then see. The speed will increase. Try to copy less amount of data at a time. Like 5 to 10 GB.

[CassandraD]

This is because you are using the usb on a older interface. It is right that if you connect the drive on the backside of your pc then the speed might increase. You will not going to get good speed on a old interface. For that you need a usb 3.0 card. There are ample of pci cards available on web which you can buy and attach on your board. I did the same thing. I had bought a high speed usb hub that came with 10 port support with separate power adapter. After connecting multiple pen drive on it, the data transfer very slow. Later on bought a usb 3.0 pci card from web. It was cheap and looks better. I had connected the same on my pc and it worked well. The speed was around 20 to 30mb/s on a single usb. You can do the same thing. Either try to copy them one by one slowly or just connect a pci card on the board and get high data transfer speed. Other thing you can do is get a good file copier software. The internal copy paste utility of windows is a bit poor. Download and install FastCopy in your system. This software allows you a simple and fast way of copying files at different location. It works fine and has no performance issue.

[Bala Murugan S]

File copier will only help you to keep the copy paste on. It will not give you a high speed data transfer speed. You can use it for continuous copying mode. I do this in my system via tera copy. It works fine. Just use tera to copy the entire files from one place to another.

[Ry]

You can try a bit of troubleshooting things here. Like updating the usb drivers. This might help you in fixing the issue. On web you can find updates about new usb drivers. Download and install them in your system. It might work.The current speed which you had mentioned is very low. There can be some problem with port.Along with updating the usb drivers also go ahead with updating the chipset drivers. This would be more helpful. For file copying I also use Teracopy. I think this software can boost around 10 to 20% of your existing transfer speed. Not more than that. But the benefit of having this tool is that it gives you a constant transfer speed. Sometime the internal windows copy paste utility freezes and does not allow you to do anything. Try using Teracopy first.