USB 2.0 Hard Drive transfer rate

  • Thread starter Thread starter John Blaustein
  • Start date Start date
J

John Blaustein

I'm trying to figure out how long it should take to transfer 30GB from an
internal hard drive on a Dell laptop to an external HD -- WD 500GB USB 2.0
drive.

Roughly, how would one calculate that?

Thanks!

John
 
Follow-up to original post...

I am confused by Mbits/s, MB/s, Mbps, bits, bytes, etc.

Thanks...

John
 
John Blaustein said:
Follow-up to original post...

I am confused by Mbits/s, MB/s, Mbps, bits, bytes, etc.

Thanks...

John
Click to expand...

Just google bits and bytes and read all about it.
 
Justme... I Googled and found a nice calculator at:
http://www.speedguide.net/conversion.php

If I enter 480 into the megabits field, it shows .055 GB. If I understand
this correctly, the USB 2.0 transfer rate is 480Megabits/second, or
..055GB/sec. For 30GB, I figure nine minutes, if I'm doing the math
correctly (which I may well not be!).

Clayton... thanks for the estimate. If my numbers above are right, it means
that transfer rate probably isn't 480Mb/s. I assume the real transfer rate
won't match the "theoretical" rate.

The reason I'm asking is that my son's Dell laptop is running very slowly
and things aren't working quite right. I'm transferring all his data
(mostly music files) to an external HD and then I'm going to reformat and
reinstall everything. The transfer is taking WAY longer than what I first
estimated and you confirm. When I run the Error-Checking tool in the
Properties>Tools, it doesn't complete. I think there are some file system
errors. Question: If there are file system errors, would that account for
the very slow file transfer? (It's XP Home.)

Thanks.

John
 
You stated the cause. It will take as long as it takes.

"The reason I'm asking is that my son's Dell laptop is running very
slowly and things aren't working quite right."
 
Clayton,

I've reformatted the HD and reinstalled XP Home. Copying the files from the
ext HD back to the int HD took just about exactly what you estimated.

Thanks again.

John
 
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