Quite bad USB3 speed on SP2 512GB

[palain90]

Hello,
I am very badly surprised by the speed I obtain from the USB3 port: I am back-uping datas on a Sandisk USB3 Extreme key and I am also syncing some datas with a Galaxy Note 2.
When I do it with a home desktop (quite old : more than 3 years) I have through its integrated USB2 port I get better speed (without needing to measure as it is so apparent in time) than what I get with the integrated USB3 port of the SP2, anybody who could have an idea of possible settings to tune/improve?
Bye
Alain

 

[Korlon]

Hmm, on my SP2 using a Western Digital My Passport 2 TB external HDD I get write speeds hovering around 90-100MB/s. I get the same transfer speeds off other laptops with USB 3.0. From a USB 2.0 port that same drive achieves about 45 MB/S average.

How does that compare to you?

 

[stranger4all]

Don't understand what's wrong with your device , maybe the files you are transferring are very small and many , it happens to all transfers if the size of the files are in bytes and are in many thousands.

 

[Philtastic]

I've had it happen where I've had subpar USB 3.0 speed with a USB stick (eg. transfer from USB to SP2 of ~20-30 MB/sec) and found that I just had to uninstall the USB stick's driver in Device Manager while it was plugged in, take it out, and plug it back in and I guess it installs the right driver at which point I was getting 90-100 MB/sec transferring the same files. You should see if that helps.

 

[palain90]

I have to clarify a little more the operation I am proceeding with, which was making me thinking such bad speed (I am not sure now that the most important issue is the USB speed because of the complementary analysis I did, reported below):

1) I am backuping 5 files from the SP2 to the Sandisk USB3 stick
2) The backup is AES 256b compress/crypted in case I lose the stick (through a SW called Allway Sync)
3) the 5 files are 1st 262MegB 2nd 853MegB 3rd 116MegB 4th 15MegB 5th 17MegB

From this backup I am also transferring the files on another PC, an old (more than 3y) HP desktop Pentium Dual Core 2,6GHz with only 4GB memory and HDD instead of SSD!

Measuring the times of such compress-crypt (or decompress-decrypt) & transfer operations I get:
SP2 => Sandisk = more than 7mn (7'10" to 7'30")
Sandisk => HP = in the 1mn range (50 to 60")
HP => Sandisk = in the 3mn+ range (3'10 to 3'30")
Sandisk => SP2 = in 1mn+ range (1'10 to 1'15")

The time difference between SP2 => Sandisk versus HP => Sandisk was making me thinking about a USB speed issue, I am not so sure now!
I start to believe the issue is in the AES 256b and compress,
Your feedbacks and feelings are more than helpful
Also if somebody can tell me a SW which could run in background measuring the real USB transfer speed?
Last, normally I would think the TPM chip integrated in the SP2 platform would had help for the compress/crypt operation, it looks it is not the case!
I am very surprised the SP2 with 8GB, a SSD and an A5 QuadCore is not more performing than an old DualCore Pentium E5300! In fact it is worst by a ratio if 2
Thanks in advance for any idea
Alain

 

[GypsyMoth]

May not be applicable to your large backup files- and that you need Android compatibility, but I have had issues with speed when using exFat formatted SD cards under specific conditions. I have a few vehicle workshop manuals that contain a significant number of very small files. For my needs I simply formatted the SD card NTFS and performance significantly improved. I understand that NTFS won't be compatible with my Android devices (and other systems) however this isn't a concern for me; also please understand that for almost all normal sized files there will not be any throughput improvement.

 

[jollywombat]

I am unaware of any background apps that monitor throughput to a USB device/Flash card, but you could simply test your speeds using software like CrystalDiskMark which will benchmark it. Try running it on both the SP2 and your HP desktop and check the speed results. Make sure you SP2 is not in a low power/battery saving mode as this can limit the overall speed of the device, would suggest High Performance.

The TPM in the SP2 (this is assuming you have the refreshed model with the i4300 CPU and not the i4200 which does not have the TPM module) does not do any sort of encryption/decryption functions. It is only a secure storage location for encryption keys for applications which support it.

 

[palain90]

Thanks for all these feedbacks,
I found an interesting sw (link below for who is interested) which is able to give the complete usb map of pc, indicating the speed details of each port :
windows - Verifying USB connection speed (USB 3 or USB 2?) - Super User
Using it I had been able to confirm that my Extreme USB flash disk is well connected on a USB3 port (superspeed in this sw), then the issue is not there, I am going to investigate the real tranfer speed achieved on both the HP desktop and the SP2,
In particular I am going to check the operating mode
Thanks again

 

[palain90]

Problem solved, the time to do the operation SP2 => Sandisk = more than 7mn (7'10" to 7'30") had now been divided by more than 2 when using High Performance mode (time in the 2 to 3 mn max range, better than the HP desktop).
Thanks to jollywonbat.
For those interested by this USB 3 subject another link: How to determine whether a USB 3.0 device is operating at SuperSpeed? - Microsoft Windows USB Core Team Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs with useful informations