Important NOTAM to users of USB3.0/1 External Hard Drives...

[Sesquashtoo 2,846]

If you are running W10 (any version) and own any external hard drives such as the Western Digital My Book line of drive, in any capacity, and you are connected to a true USB 3.0, or 3.1 SuperSpeed USB port, and where you should be seeing transfer rates of normally between 115, to 120 MB/s, but are only seeing, and have every only seen around 55-62 MB/s...here's why...and here's how to fix the fact that you ever only reading and writing at USB 2.0 speeds all the while.

It is the external drive's driver Policy

Here's what to do...to check...and truly get USB 3.0 SuperSpeed, and for some, perhaps after reading this post...for the very first time, after your re-boot!

Open up Device Manager:

Expand Disk Drives:

Find your USB Drive or drives...and right click on the drive. Open up Properties: You will see the Policy Tab (second one from the left). Open up that tab, and change the policy to enable-cache writing.  You will get a windows notification box that your computer system needs to re-boot, for this policy change to take into effect.  That's all you have to do...and welcome to the double the speed and TRUE transfer rates that your drives were capable of, but never gave you...because Windows 7 or 10, always is configured to NOT have external drives with the same write-cache capacity that your internal drives DO come W10 (default configured!).  If you do use the better performance box as ticked off in your Policy Tab, you must then always properly (is you do this at all...) use the W10 USB dismount utility (at the bottom right of your monitor with called up) to remove your drives from your system. If you do not do this properly, and only unplug the USB cable..or, turn off (by removing the AC puck from the socket), you will lose data that was still in the Read/Write Cache, but did not get written to the drive at that second.  So, always remove your USB cable, or turn off that external drive, ONLY after properly dismounting it with the W10 or W7 utility for that event. When you properly dismount the drive from W10 or W7 seeing it...that will cause W(x) to finish writing out the data that was in the Cache, and then will close down the drive read/write session, with no loss of data.

Welcome to true 115-120 MB/s USB 3.0 SuperSpeed transfer speeds.

Enjoy

[vortex681 806]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't this just make the external drive LOOK faster whilst still taking the same amount of time as it did previously before you can actually unplug it? You're just loading the data that can't immediately be saved to the drive into the cache from which it then transfers (in the background) at the drive's default rate. The actual amount of time the drive has to be plugged in doesn't change.

[Sesquashtoo 2,846]

11 hours ago, vortex681 said:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't this just make the external drive LOOK faster whilst still taking the same amount of time as it did previously before you can actually unplug it? You're just loading the data that can't immediately be saved to the drive into the cache from which it then transfers (in the background) at the drive's default rate. The actual amount of time the drive has to be plugged in doesn't change.

It's not the time the drive has to be plugged in, it's that it is acting in memory cache of data waiting to be put out that now, is the same as your system drives.  When you have quick disconnect, (default) enabled, the O.S. has to wait for the drive to respond ready to receive data live-time, rather than from its already processed cache.  That's why more expensive drives have larger cache memory on-board. Now your external drives can use the system memory for the same purpose.  The MB/s rate is the read and write speed of your medium, as well as if cache is enabled, or not enabled.

[vortex681 806]

But the fact remains that if it previously took 5 minutes to write some files to your external drive/USB stick, it will now still be at least 5 minutes before you can unplug it, even though the files appear to have been written much quicker. The physical drive speed hasn't really changed, the data is just being from the cache as a background task (which could actually take longer if the system is busy).

[Sesquashtoo 2,846]

On 6/9/2017 at 4:24 AM, vortex681 said:

But the fact remains that if it previously took 5 minutes to write some files to your external drive/USB stick, it will now still be at least 5 minutes before you can unplug it, even though the files appear to have been written much quicker. The physical drive speed hasn't really changed, the data is just being from the cache as a background task (which could actually take longer if the system is busy).

Actually, no....I am now hitting speeds of 158 MB/s, and my interplay between two My Book USB 3.0 SuperSpeed drives is cut in about half.  Before, I was averaging about 38-62 MB/s. The O.S. does not have to stand idle, between read/writes cycles.