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Scott Cox's avatar
Scott Cox
Brass Contributor
Aug 10, 2017

Fluctuations in USB Speed

I have Win10 desktop with USB 3.0 native to the motherboard.  I have several backup devices (external drives and jump drives), all 3.0 ,that will at times back up at much slower speeds than they ought to.

 

For example today creating an image of my boot drive took 55 minutes when it’s normally about 12 minutes: 8.2GB/Min vs. 1.8GB/Min.  This doesn’t happen often, but it’s terribly annoying when it does.  I have utilities that verify that my ports are indeed USB 3.0.  I use the two ports on the front of my PC and both have had this issue.

 

If I unplug the external device and re-plug it in, the problem seems to go away.

 

  1. What’s causing the occasional super-slow speed?

     2. Is there a utility that I could run before doing a long backup that would do a quick check to make sure that the connection I have is running at the proper USB 3.0 speed?

 

Thanks. 

 

Alienware X51, 3.40 gigahertz Intel Core i7-6700, 64-bit ready, Multi-core (4 total)

Hyper-threaded (8 total), 16 GB memory

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