I guess I should start MY own thread, too...except it would all be naive computer questions!

I picked up a Lacie USB 3.0 external drive and am testing it out a bit. Transferring a 69GB folder is running about 18 minutes (About 45MB/Second). Is it me, or does this not seem all that...well...blazing?

Dell XPS9100, Win7 64-bit, Core i7 3.2GHz, 24GB RAM

What are you transferring from, and are you using a USB 3.0 port?

Hi Ken:
Just from my Primary drive and yes, it's through an NEC USB 3.0 card I installed.

I guess the speed isn't so great, huh, considering you didn't simply post: "You're doing great there, Mark!"

It's not terrible, but you're probably not going to see all that much more than that. Let's do the math... what you're seeing is 360Mbit/sec. The currently available SATA standards (which is what's on the drives themselves) are 150Mbit/sec, 300Mbit/sec, and 600Mbit/sec. Assuming mechanical hard drives on both sides, I'm frankly amazed at the numbers you're getting and suspect that I'm doing the math wrong. You shouldn't be seeming much more than 20MB/sec, if I am doing the math right.

That's about right. Go ahead and do the same transfer via USB 2.0 and you'll get roughly half the rate / double the time.

Spec says USB 3.0 is 10x faster than USB 2.0 but when tested, you'll get 2-3x faster (real world) depending on number of files and file size. Even with USB 2.0 you don't get close to spec performance: rated at 480Mbps but typically 150-170Mbps real world.

Hmmmm... I wasn't expecting 10X but thought 5-6X faster. Maybe my expectations were just too high.

Thanks for the feedback guys!