Essentials 2TB USB 3.0 Poor Performance

WD External and Portable SSD External SSD for Windows
1

Hi all.  I am using a Lenovo W520 laptop with Win7 64bit and 8GB RAM and an internal 7200RPM drive with very little software installed.  Win7 is patched to SP1.

I just unboxed my new My Book Essentials 2TB USB 3.0 drive and the drive has terrible performance writing from my C to it.  The performance, according to the Windows Copy dialog box is about 30MB/sec.  If I write FROM the Essentials back to C, I get about 130MB/sec.  I am copying video files ranging from 50MB to 800MB in size…transferring about 35GB of them to the Essentials box.

I’ve looked for drivers on the Lenovo site and there is nothing regarding USB 3.0.  I am definitely using the USB 3.0 port.  I see nothing on the WD site for help.

Western Digital’s automatic firmware updater (forget the name) updated the firmware from .003 to .007 and I rebooted the laptop and power cycled the WD unit…no effect.  I am praying that this is not expected performance!

Any ideas?  If you need driver or version confirmations, please be very specific where I can find that information.

Thanks in advance!

-Fred

2

30 MB/s is a standard transfer speed for USB 2.0.  You may try connecting the drive to another system using USB 3.0 to see if you receive the same results. 

3

Do you also have any USB 2.0 devices connected? I recently read some PCs that USB 3.0 works with no USB 2.0 devices connected but when a USB 2.0 is plugged the USB 3.0 speed drops to USB 2.0 level.

Joe