External hard drive REALLY slow in transferring data..

I just bought a new external hard drive and did a disk check etc.. before using it more and it passed all the tests so far.

I transferred files yesterday from My pc internal hard drive to the external hard drive and it had no problem. It seems to work just fine transferring from hard drive to hard drive but there is an issue with transferring data to small drives ( like sd cards, micro cards, usb drives etc..).

Before anyone speculates the small drives/cards i use are not '' slow'' well slower to transfer data rather than hard drives yes but by no means should it take hours to transfer small amounts of data. What i am experiencing in long transfer times to small drives/ cards ( sd, micro, etc..).

My other OLDER external hard drive does just fine, it transfers about 4 gb of data to my small flash drives, or sd cards in just about 10-12 minutes. This new external hard drive takes 1 HOUR to do this task. How can i solve this?

Its obviously an issue because the older external hard drive doesn't take this long 1 hr for 4 gb of data to transfer to sd and flash drives is way above ''regular'' even if said sd cards and flash drives are not the fastest ones out there.

 

Can you please post the speed Windows is reporting for the transfer?

 

How do i check this?

 

The problem with transferring from external to other externals is that you bottleneck in many places.

Assuming you have a usb 2.1 external hard drive and are copying to a class 10 sd card:

There is a bottleneck with external HDD rotational speed. This bottlenecks furthers with USB 2.1, then it transfers through (probably USB 2.1) to the flash device, and then it has to deal with a maximum write speed of 10MB/S. You are also reading from the external HDD, again bottlenecked by the USB controller.

Now these numbers might change a bit, but the end result is still multiple bottlenecks.

Then, if you look at the type of data, that makes a huge difference too. Transferring text files will fly and probably cap the maximum allowed speed by the controller (which is the slowest link usually). Compressed files? They will be considerably slower.

Would these smaller devices happen to be tablets or cell phones? That introduces even more bottlenecks. Believe it or not, it is usually quicker to copy to internal HDD and then to them.

 

When you start the transfer in Windows a box pops up with a bar on it saying how much has been copied. There should also be a line at the bottom that reads something like show more detail. Click on this and it should report a transfer speed. Monitor this for a few minutes and report the highest value you see when copying to a slow device. Then post what the device is you are trying to copy from, and to.