4TB USB 3.0 External Hard Drive

Quick question: why on earth am I hitting a wall at 20MB/s when transferring data over USB 3.0? I initially suspected the bottleneck might be the speed of the Hard Drive I'm pulling from, so I ran a test moving files from one 3.0 USB drive to another, but the results were just as dismal.

I noticed you can toggle the setting from “Quick removal” to Better performance, but honestly, that feels like a band-aid rather than a real fix. I’m more interested in understanding the underlying reason why the speeds are this abysmal in the first place.

PC Specs:
Windows 8.1
MSI B75MA-E31
Intel i5 3570k 4.5GHz
Corsair h80
Corsair Vengeance 4x4GB DDR3 1600MHz
Corsair hx i850w
Gigabyte gtx 970 g1 gaming
500GB Samsung evo 850
2x HDD 7.200rpm 1TB

The external Hard Drive in question is: Samsung M3 Portable 4 TB

Ryan Gonzalez4 said:The question is, why can't I transfer data faster than 20MB/s if it's supposedly USB 3.0? I thought maybe the bottleneck was just the speed of the Hard Drive I'm copying from, so I tested a 3.0 to 3.0 connection and it's still just as slow.

I noticed you can switch from “Quick removal” to Better performance, but honestly, that doesn't feel like much of a fix. I’m more interested in knowing why the speeds are this abysmal in the first place.

PC Specs:
Windows 8.1
MSI B75MA-E31
Intel i5 3570k 4.5GHz
Corsair h80
Corsair Vengeance 4x4GB DDR3 1600MHz
Corsair hx i850w
Gigabyte gtx 970 g1 gaming
500GB Samsung evo 850
2x Hard Drive 7.200rpm 1TB

The external Hard Drive in question is: Samsung M3 Portable 4 TB

Try checking "enable write caching" in that same menu where you switched to Better performance. 🙂

goldenviper13 said:If you're heading over to that setting to switch things up for better performance, you might want to consider checking the box for "enable write caching" as well. It’s worth a look. 🙂

But that isn't really a solution, is it? Honestly, I can't wrap my head around how anyone could look at 20MB/s on a USB 3.0 connection and call that normal. It’s just absurd.

It really all depends on what you're trying to move, because if you’re tackling something like a thousand individual photos, those speeds might actually be pretty standard since that specific Hard Drive is notorious for being sluggish when it comes to random write speeds. You might also want to double-check that you've got the latest USB 3.0 drivers installed, and honestly, the same goes for your chipset drivers too. It’s also worth diving into your BIOS to see if there's an option to manually enable USB 3.0 support, and if the drive happens to be formatted in FAT32, switching it over to NTFS could make a world of difference. To get a better idea of what's actually happening under the hood, try running a quick test with CrystalDiskMark, Drew Allen77, just to see what kind of actual read and write speeds you're getting.

Is it actually possible for a drive to skip USB 3.0 entirely? I once had a drive labeled as "USB 3.0" only to find out the actual port and the hardware inside the enclosure were stuck on USB 2.0 speeds 😢

Man, those cheap imports...

Anything is possible, really. I've got a 1TB WD external Hard Drive via USB 3.0, and while large files can hit about 100 MB/s, the average usually sits closer to 60-65 MB/s. My laptop is currently running on a standard 5400 rpm Hard Drive, though things would definitely run smoother if I switched over to an SSD.

Ryan Gonzalez4 said:So, what’s the deal with why I can't push past 20MB/s even though I'm using USB 3.0? I figured maybe it was just the speed of the Hard Drive I'm pulling from, so I tried a 3.0-to-3.0 connection and it's still crawling at the same pace.

I saw you can switch from “Quick removal” to Better performance, but honestly, that feels like a band-aid, not a real fix. I really want to know why it's performing this terribly in the first place.

First off, if you actually want any semblance of Better performance, you've gotta switch it over—it enables caching and all that good stuff.

Second, if you're trying to move a massive pile of tiny little files, those speeds are totally normal.

Third, let's be real: USB isn't exactly optimized for heavy lifting with drives. Expecting top-tier speeds is a bit of a stretch.

What else can you try? Use something with a multithreaded copy routine—like Robocopy or whatever. The standard Windows copy tool is honestly pretty dumb and outdated. You could also try moving larger individual files instead of thousands of small ones, or defragment the source Hard Drive if it's looking messy.

The main thing I'm wondering about is whether there are even any drivers available for USB 3.0?

Someone once said there’s no such thing as a stupid question, 😵 so I’ll go ahead and ask: did you try plugging the drive into a blue USB port?

If you had actually bothered to read the specs before pulling the trigger on that purchase, you probably would have picked a different drive altogether.

He’s actually laying it all out for you right there in his Review of the drive. I can't see any content here—you just posted a link! If you were trying to share something specific for me to look at or rewrite, you'll need to paste the actual text. Just drop the content in whenever you're ready.

So, I’ve been staring at these benchmarks for an hour now—honestly, it’s driving me up the wall—and the random write speeds are just... well, they're abysmal. It’s one thing if you’re dealing with sequential transfers, but this? This is something else entirely. I ran CrystalDiskMark on my setup—it's a Windows 8.1 MSI B75MA-E31 Intel I5 3570 build, nothing fancy, just what I have on hand—and the results are frankly insulting. I was expecting something halfway decent, especially since I'm using a Samsung drive, but the numbers are just crawling. I mean, I guess maybe there's some weird bottleneck happening somewhere? I don't know. It feels like I'm trying to push water through a needle. I tried using Robocopy to see if that would help stabilize things during a transfer, thinking maybe it was just a file system quirk or something involving how the FAT32 partition handles small chunks, but nope. Still sluggish. It’s incredibly frustrating because when you're actually trying to get work done, those tiny, random writes are what matter most for system responsiveness. Instead, I'm just sitting here watching a progress bar move at the speed of a glacier. Is it the Hard Drive itself? Is it the controller? I honestly can't tell, and that's the part that really gets under my skin. Everything should just *work*, right? Not this.

Honestly, my guess is that he probably sorted everything out the second the issue stopped popping up. I’ve always found those types to be the most amusing—they’ll drop a question in your lap, get exactly what they need, and then just vanish into thin air without a trace.