You have a very slow hard drive
this post was submitted on 10 May 2026
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Spinning media is slower than solid state NAND storage
Sata is 6gb/s at its fastest which is what most hdds connect with. Your nvme depending on pcie version and then even your usb port speed all matter. I have a pcie5 nvme my mobo supports the usb c type gen 69420 street fighter alpha 3 which tops out at 40gb/s I think. I also bought the fastest Kingston traveller usb stick I could. It's pretty fast. What I've found is the diff between pcie5 and 4 is really not noticeable to me. Nice to have but I think I should have bought a bigger pcie 4 than a 1tb 5 nvme.
Love me some Street fighter alpha 3!
My penis Fell off
Lucky.. I had to pay for that
There are four things that matter for transfer speed between storage devices.
- How fast the source reads
- How fast the target writes
- How fast the bits can be moved between them
- What post-write nonsense is done.
USB sticks tend to be flash memory with relatively equal read and write speeds, but the spinning disks in a hard disk drive are noticeably unequal. So, unless the USB is very slow, you'd expect a USB to HDD copy to be slower than either USB to USB or HDD to USB.
You can also be slowed down by antivirus scans, on-disk encryption, search indexing, or even the need to move bits from the USB bus to the HDD controller.
Kinda depends on all 3 devices. Some USB devices can have extremely high burst rates before they're heat saturated or some have ssd's built in that can nearly peg the bus speed. Slow spindisks would be in the range of 80 mb/s or so where fast ones like sata Exos drives would be nearly 300 mb/s and sas even faster, some even bursting to max out the bus speed with their cache. Another factor is the load itself. Random access data is incredibly slow on spindisks compared to virtually any USB device, meaning lots of small files are going to crawl compared to big ones. Bit locker and tpm could be slowing it down if it needs to decrypt which isn't likely slowing the USB drives down.
I think you'd get a better set of potential issues by being specific about the devices and interfaces.
Hard drives are slow. These are mechanical devices that have to physically move the header to the right place. Add data fragmentation that multiplies the movements on top of that and it's a performance nightmare
I have a near 0 expertise on this, but could it be a difference between storage format ? Like difference between NFTS and exFAT ?
First of all: I hate that you're downvoted when you're explicitly up-front about having zero expertise on this, before putting forward a completely valid hypothesis.
Secondly: It's very unlikely that formatting is the culprit here. I/O operations (read/write) are far slower than CPU operations, especially on spin-discs (like HDD's), they can be several orders of magnitude slower. When you copy data, it's basically
- Read data (I/O)
- Possibly do some formatting, scanning, whatever (CPU)
- Write data (I/O)
Whichever of these is your choke-point will determine your speed. It's very unlikely that a pure copy operation will be choked by the CPU-bound task. Much more likely that the read/write speed of the HDD is the culprit.
Downvote does not mean we hate you. Downvote means incorrect/unhelpful/unrelated
it's very unlikely
There you have it.
Downvote means incorrect/unhelpful/unrelated
I've never before actually seen anyone argue that downvotes should be used for stuff that's incorrect, especially when it's not touted as being correct in the first place. Downvotes are for "the thread would be a better place without this".
Either way, the OP here isn't even stating anything as fact, but openly speculating. If just can't fathom why anyone would downvote someone for being open about their ignorance and freely speculating/hypothesizing over an answer. The only thing that does is contribute to the discussion by adding a new facet/idea people can respond to.
Edit: Also, "very unlikely" != "incorrect". Even if downvoting was used for incorrect answers, it would be wrong to downvote here since the post is asking a question, and a question, more or less by definition, cannot be incorrect.
Okay, thanks a lot for this neatly detailed reply! I'll sleep less dumb tonight
Probably because the USBs are on the same bus