I have a SATA USB external hard drive. The box claims spees of
400mb/s. I have never achieved this - using USB 2 port, I never go
above 40/50Mb/s
Why is this please?
Does the box claim 400Mb/s or "up to" that?
400Mb/s is only the USB theoretical maxium bus speed, not
the speed of the drive or the resultant realized speed. In
other words, marketing departments are twisting the truth to
make products seem better than they are, and feel they can
get away with it because it is very common for products to
be vaguely rated this way, other manufacturers also do this
with some USB2 external products.
Also note the difference between "Mb" (megabit) and "MB"
(megabyte). 8 bit = 1 byte, 400Mb = 50MB
Also, it is very unlikely you actually achieve 40-50MB at
all, except in extremely limited, cached transfers. Typical
USB2 speed is about 35MB/s or less depending on the size &
number of files (much slower with many tiny files).