Forum Discussion

TenOC's avatar
TenOC
Nomad
Nov 04, 2022

Transfer rate between two USB 3.0 ports??

My HP EliteBook 8770w laptop has 2 USB 3.0 ports on the left side. I have a red WavLink dual bay external hard drive docking station connected to one of USB ports. I have single day external hard drive docking station connected to the other USB port.

My task is to copy (not clone) about 1 TB of selected files from HD “A” to HD “B”.

My question, would the transfer rate be faster if I put both the hard drives in the dual bay WavLink docking station or put one drive in the WavLink docking station and the other drive in the single bay hard drive docking station?

In other words, on my laptop are the two USB ports independent each with 5Gbps a total of 10 Gbps or are they parallel ports off the same chip/bus with a total of 5Gbps?

I understand that my hard drives transfer rate will be substantially less than the maximum transfer rate for the USB ports.
  • opnspaces's avatar
    opnspaces
    Navigator II
    Nov 04, 2022
    The speed is dependent on the slowest connection. So ignoring the actual hard drive speeds the fastest you will get is with both drives in the double docking station.

    If you have true 3.0 USB ports (blue plugs) they may be faster in theory than the docking station. But the transfer will never be faster than the dual docking station. The speed might be equal, it might be slower, but it cannot be faster. Again think slowest connection.

    This might be confusing or it might help.

    The numbers below are completely made up for ease of understanding.

    Pretend the docking station can input and output at 1 GB per sec
    Pretend the USB 3.0 can input and output at 2 GB per second.
    Your transfer is dependent on the slowest connection (1GB per second)
    Because the slowest point is 1GB at the docking station your speed would be the same whether you used the USB or just the docking station.


    Now flip the numbers
    Pretend the docking station can input and output at 2 GB per sec
    Pretend the USB 3.0 can input and output at 1 GB per second.
    Your transfer is dependent on the slowest connection (1GB per second) In this case you would be faster unplugging from the USB and using the docking station alone

    But all this goes out the window if the docking station cannot just copy disk to disk an instead must go through the USB to the computer and back. In this case you're still limited by the slowest connection.

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