Will My Hdd Speeds Increase By Going Internal?

I run several thousand gigs of video to my Plex server via 3-4 small external hard drives. These are the cheap ones you buy from Target, Walmart or Best Buy that are around 4TB each and run at 5,400RPM (like the Seagate Expansion Drives or the Western Digital Passports). I have found that when I need to start moving things around and I begin copying from these drives (or even from one drive to another), the transfer times are egregious. We're talking days for multiple large files (and sometimes I just give up).

I either have space in my case for one larger internal drive or two hot-swap drives I can insert into a USB Raid/Thunderbolt drive I have. So I was thinking about just going back to internal drives to increase the speed.

Here is my question; the best deals I'm finding is on 5,400RPM drives (but internal instead of external). I don't want to end up in the same predicament. But would I still see a huge speed jump if I just go with the 5,400 and change to internal with the next set of drives? Would they still outperform the tiny USB expansion drives? Or do I HAVE to go up to 7,200 to see a difference?

 

I personally wouldn’t expect too much of a speed jump with HDDs but by installing a SSD you would see a dramatic speed increase.

 

You will definitely see some improvement but I agree with Goddess Bastet that it likely will not be very significant. I suspect simply going through the USB interface is one of your biggest (narrowest) bottlenecks. But going back and forth through multiple SATA interfaces in the same computer will not be a big improvement.

If your motherboard's USB ports, as well as the external devices are all USB 3.0, (and not the more common, less capable and less expensive USB 2.0) that may help. But its the weakest link scenario - speeds will be that of the slowest in the chain.

Other limiting factors are the amount of RAM you have in your system, as well as the capability of your CPU. Even the bus speeds your motherboard supports matter. Yes, being only 5400RPM is a factor, but again, going with 7200 will not provide much improvement.

I also agree migrating to all SSDs will help a lot. But they too will be bottlenecked by all those other restrictions.

And yes, copying from one drive to another drive will always take the longest time. You "might" (no promises) be able to speed those transfer speeds up some if the source drive is in one computer and the destination drive is in another computer and you connect the two computers via 1Gbps Ethernet.

But if you are expecting to go from days to minutes, I got this swamp land in Florida I will let you have for a real good deal!

 

Jokes on you...I already live there! Squatters rights baby!

And sure, I'd love to go SSD, but that would be thousands of dollars for the amount of hard drive space I need (I'm at about 12TB right now and climbing). Perhaps there is something to the fact that my processor and ram might be slowing down (I believe all the other links in the chain are all uniformed at USB 3.0, including the ports). I'm running an i7 4770 @ 3.50GHz with 16 GB of ram on a Windows 7 machine. But when I upgrade to Windows 10 soon, perhaps that will open things up a bit.

 

LOL

Okay, you have plenty of horsepower (CPU and RAM resources). So it seems you are just being limited by "normal" copy and paste limitations. Windows 10 is certainly better at managing resources than W7 but there are simple physical limitations here that cannot be improved upon with any significance.

Fortunately (I am assuming) you will not be copying the same files back and forth multiple times, repeatedly. So your best bet might be to just start the copying process and go to bed - for 2 or 3 days.

Just note if these are files you don't want to lose, you need multiple backup copies. You say these are budget drives, but note that ALL drive WILL fail - eventually.

 

Indeed, this is also a concern of mine. Is there are data on which drives (internal drives vs portable USB) have a higher life cycle, and lower failure rate?

Also, I would assume SATA is generally faster than USB, so does that not also make the case for going internal if I want a speed bump?

 

It is important to note that generally speaking, in terms of the hard drive device itself, internal drives are exactly the same as external drives. The difference is how they are powered and the data transfers go through an additional interface (USB) with external drives. So external drives have additional components there fore more chances for failure. Plus not all USB devices are made with the highest quality components.

Frankly, I have never considered USB to be reliably consistent - except maybe for keyboards and mice.

As for speeds, I already addressed that in post #3 above.