Is my new SSD slow???

[JHZR2]

Sometime back I learned about the need for the right USB cables, even if A to C, to get maximum speed out of them. Since then, things have improved greatly. The issue at the time was being unable to look at my entire camera roll (>50k photos) on my 1TB iphone 15 pro. The right cable made it go from impossible to seconds.

Ive gotten two new USB 3.1 gen 2 Anker cables. I know this works well as it resolved my photo sync issue. I dont have them benchmarked, but they are 10Gbps cables.

https://www.anker.com/products/a8465?search_category=autofill&q=powerline&variant=37437749198998

Both the phone and SSD are connected with these.

Im still on my 2013 MBP (intel i7). The backup for my iphone got too big for the prior Samsung T5 USB SSD, so I got a new one. its a Crucial X10 Pro, capable of 2000MB/s. I know my computer, with only USB A, is limited to I believe 5Gb/s.

I reformatted the SSD to APFS, and plugged it in. I dont backup to the internal HDD, so I set up an alias for the target to the new drive, just like I had before.

I started the backup; it was 10:49pm. Now its 11:40pm, and Ive only written 106 GB.

Seems something isnt right. Isnt this slow? Both devices should be communicating at roughly 5Gb/s.

Lets say it is 125 GB by the time an hour rolls around. Thus 1000Gb. In 3600s. That's 0.28 Gb/s. Seems slow, no? I know long term writing slows things down, but that much??!?

 

[si1491]

Not sure if you have come across this but I found this Adam Savage's Tested video quite interesting when electronically dissecting higher priced vs lower priced USB cables. This may explain why some cables don't perform as expected or advertised.

 

[KevinMalone]

That does seem slow. What's the read speed of the source drive? What speeds were you getting with the Samsung T5?

 

[DemoFly]

It sounds like you're using Time Machine to back up? If so that's likely the bottleneck. There's significant error checking, history, and indexing overhead on that transfer.

 

[Pew]

Speed of the laptop, and the size/amount of files matter greatly. Your old laptop is most likely unable to transfer near full USB3.0 speeds as well. There's a significant difference in speed when I transfer files on our old company computers vs our new ones.

 

[dogememe]

USB 3.0 can do a theoretical maximum of roughly 600MB/s.

In the real world, you will get less than that.

Keep in mind transferring many small files has much more overhead than a single large file.

You’re using an 11 year old computer. There are going to be some limitations in performance no matter how good your USB cable is.

 

[cptbarkey]

How many of the photos are locally on the phone vs in the cloud?

 

[JHZR2]

That does seem slow. What's the read speed of the source drive? What speeds were you getting with the Samsung T5?

I dont know the speeds I was getting with the Samsung, TBH.

The new drive is 2000 MB/s read and write with the right cables and computer. My computer is not fast enough. But should be faster than this.

USB 3.0 can do a theoretical maximum of roughly 600MB/s.

In the real world, you will get less than that.

Keep in mind transferring many small files has much more overhead than a single large file.

You’re using an 11 year old computer. There are going to be some limitations in performance no matter how good your USB cable is.

Well I think I found the root cause.

The new HDD mounted up and the USB controller indicated it was a 5Gb/s item.

My iphone mounted up and the computer said it was a 480Mb/s. Not sure why it didnt recognize the iphone 15 pro as 5Gb/s too, since it is capable of double that with the right computer hardware.

I cycled the cables a few times and both items are now showing 5Gb/s. That’s a 10x difference on paper from how it was reading last night.

So I was seeing about 50% performance from the nameplate connection speed of the slower of the two items.

 

[JHZR2]

How many of the photos are locally on the phone vs in the cloud?

I dont randomly upload my photos to any cloud. I keep them archived a few other ways, but before doing an OS update, I always back up and pull down the latest so that I dont lose any. I also back up an image of my phone in its entirety to a separate drive.

Figure 60k-ish photos and movies on my phone. I take a lot of kids, places, projects, etc. since 2008...

But that was all resolved long ago with a proper cable, which was capable of 10Gb/s versus whatever I had been using, which was good for 480 Mb/s.

The odd thing that spurred my question today is that for some reason, my phone mounted up and the USB connection claimed 480Mb/s despite using the right cable. Ejecting and re-installing the cable has both devices recognized on the controller as 5Gb/s capable, which wasnt the case before.

 

[jayjr1105]

Not sure if you have come across this but I found this Adam Savage's Tested video quite interesting when electronically dissecting higher priced vs lower priced USB cables. This may explain why some cables don't perform as expected or advertised.

That's a thunderbolt cable (completely different animal) and mostly irrelevant here. As long as both devices support USB 3.0+ a $10 anker cable is fine.

 

[JHZR2]

With both items mounted in 5Gb/s mode, backups and more importantly, phone updates (last one I just did was >8GB) are super fast. I can only imagine how much better it would be in a newer computer making more use of the phone and drives speed capability.

So this begs the question - why did my iPhone mount up with a 480Mb/s speed the first time, and then it was 5Gb/s after I unplugged and re-plugged it in?

 

[Pew]

So this begs the question - why did my iPhone mount up with a 480Mb/s speed the first time, and then it was 5Gb/s after I unplugged and re-plugged it in?

There are additional pins with usb3 that could have had a bad or poor connection where plugging it back in could have fixed it.

 

[JHZR2]

There are additional pins with usb3 that could have had a bad or poor connection where plugging it back in could have fixed it.

I’ve used the cable maybe three times, but the usb port in my computer is 11 years old, so maybe it’s getting worn….

Thanks!

 

[PandaBear]

Keep in mind transferring many small files has much more overhead than a single large file.

This is a likely scenario. Try to copy a multiple GB file and measure the benchmark.

Garbage collection and write amplification on small writes can in theory increase the write 5x on the destination drive. If you have a bunch of small files it would be a lot small writes than a huge file.