Member Avatar for bjeffries

So I bought a rosewill 2-port USB 3.0 superspeed PCIe card and a mybook usb 3.0 WD hard drive and got all of them installed today and I am not having the transfer speeds that everyone claims you get. I hooked up the add-in card and plugged it into my power supply and booted up and installed all the necessary drivers for the drive to work. Then I plugged in my usb 3.0 external and updated the firmware on that to the latest version. I am still only getting about 45mbs on transfer. Everyone else is claiming about 127mbs on transfers.

If there something I need to do to increase my file transfer speed?

Thanks,
Brian

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Building on ' report and 's checklist, here are focused diagnostics and fixes that commonly reveal the real USB‑3 bottleneck — steps that separate host/card, cable/enclosure, and OS/power issues so the root cause becomes obvious.

Start with hardware-level isolation: confirm the add‑in card is in a full‑bandwidth slot (PCIe lane width and generation matter), try a different certified SuperSpeed cable and a different port, and remember the enclosure itself (USB↔SATA bridge + the drive inside) can be the limiter — some bridges or mechanical disks won’t deliver the top SuperSpeed numbers even when the host can. (pcisig.com)

Check OS and power settings and use a test that measures sustained throughput. Temporarily disable USB selective suspend and turn off aggressive PCIe link‑state power saving while testing; monitor CPU and disk I/O during the copy (Resource Monitor) to see where the bottleneck is. For a reliable sustained‑speed test, copy a single large file and use unbuffered I/O with robocopy:

robocopy "C:\Test" "E:\" "bigfile.iso" /J

Measure the elapsed seconds and compute MB/s = (file size in MB) ÷ seconds. The /J switch forces unbuffered I/O so the result shows sustained device/host throughput instead of cache effects. (learn.microsoft.com)

If the drive is still slow after those checks: try the external unit on a different known‑good USB‑3 host (or the motherboard’s native USB‑3 port), swap cables, try a different PCIe slot or the motherboard port, and temporarily disable real‑time AV/indexing during tests. If the device performs well elsewhere, the card/slot/driver on the original PC is at fault; if it’s slow everywhere, the enclosure/drive is the bottleneck — many traditional HDDs and bridge chips simply can’t sustain the highest SuperSpeed throughput, so use that result to decide whether a different enclosure or an SSD is the right next step. (tomshardware.com)

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Member Avatar for TurcoLoco

So I bought a rosewill 2-port USB 3.0 superspeed PCIe card and a mybook usb 3.0 WD hard drive and got all of them installed today and I am not having the transfer speeds that everyone claims you get. I hooked up the add-in card and plugged it into my power supply and booted up and installed all the necessary drivers for the drive to work. Then I plugged in my usb 3.0 external and updated the firmware on that to the latest version. I am still only getting about 45mbs on transfer. Everyone else is claiming about 127mbs on transfers.

If there something I need to do to increase my file transfer speed?

Thanks,
Brian

It sounds like you have done every logical thing that comes to mind. Remember, what a drive, card, etc. claims in performance and what real life, actual performance you get can me surprisingly different. Often the real life performance is worse than claimed specs. I have seen too many people make similar comments about disappointingly slow USB 3.0 speeds on different makes/models. It is a relatively new technology so chances are the drivers are not yet that optimized.

Typically, the main variables in this scenario that would effect your drive's performance would be:
- Hard drive make/model and its firmware.
- Add-in card in use and its drivers.
- Motherboard in use and its BIOS version (check for an update if it is newer than 2 years old)
- Operating System (and service pack) in use.
- Type and size of data being copied and the source drive.
- Other background processes/services running in the background (overall system load)
- Any type of security programs in use that could hinder the performance.

A bit off-base: make sure your system is also powerful enough to satisfy 'recommended' HW configuration. Also your PSU should be powerful enough to handle the load +25% more load at least!

Hope this helps.

Edited by TurcoLoco because: n/a
Member Avatar for bjeffries

Well you did mention a few things that I will check into. I know my drive has the latest firmware downloaded right from the WD website (yesterday). I have the latest drivers and I am running vista 64bit SP2 and just ran some updates a few days ago. I will look into my BIOS version and see if that supports the 3.0 speed and any other issues that could be hindering its performance. I dont think its my computers processing speed, I believe my computer is fairly fast, but I could be wrong(8gb RAM and 3.4ghx4 processor. I have never seen my processor or ram tapped out or even over 50% using the task manager.

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