WD My Passport Ultra 5TB running at nowhere close to rate 5Gbps.

[haralds]

I have a WD My Passport Ultra 5TB for several years. I never checked it speed, it always seemed pretty slow. I just tested it and its best performance directly connected to an M1 Ultra Studio using exFat is around 100Gbps. With HFS+ it is well below that. AFPS runs 30-50MBps.

The WD product site claims the USB 3.3.2 max of 5Gbps, which would result in an upper limit of 625MBps. I am getting less than 20% of that.

Has anybody seen better performance? This is very disappointing.

I had not tried this on Windows.

 

[russell_314]

I don’t have that drive, but I believe the speed they’re quoting is the USB 3 speed. I don’t think a spinning hard drive can get even close to that speed. If you need speed an SSD is where it’s at.

Perhaps someone more knowledgeable could give some better input though

 

[mdnky]

A standard 7200RPM drive will max out around 160MB/s to 200MB/s, while a SATA SSD will max out around 540MB/s to 560MB/s. The info on the WD site clearly states 5Gb/s (aka 625MB/s) and USB 3.1, but that's slightly deceptive as it's describing the interface speed. The drive inside will still limit the overall speed, as will how said drive is setup. Pretty sure that one uses a spinning drive.

APFS is know to be very slow on spinning drives. In fact Apple specifically recommends against APFS on spinning drives, as it'll fragment them quickly and "greatly reduce performance".

How are you testing the speed? Are there any docs/hubs/etc. in the chain, or is the drive connected directly to the computer?

 

[seggy]

I'd say 12Mb/sec is pretty typical for a modern 2.5" 5400rpm large, non-performance HDD with fragmentation over time. Very good, even, in the circumstances (assuming it's pretty full and has been written to lots over the years).

If you want to test the actual possible speed, erase the disk - you will get datarates probably 8-10 times that.

But expecting full interface speed out of it (or even an SSD) would be... expecting magic.

 

[genexx]

The 5gb/sec i only the USB Connection Speed and as stated above, is not possible to reach for a spinning drive.
My WD MyBook 25ED 12TB runs when copying large files at 210MB/sec (APFS) because that is the Max Write Rate of the Spinning Drive.

When having an SSD connected via USB3 5Gbit/sec you can reach maybe 480MB/Sec because there is some overhead in the connection protocol and with small files the Write and Read Rate of any Drive drop dramatically.