Confused on usb hard drive transfer rate

[casioman]

I have two usb drives both made by Iomega - one is 500gb on a FAT32 file system and the other is a 1TB on NTFS file system.

When I capture video to both drives, the 1TB looses frames but the 500gb does not. Reading the spec of these two drives , they both have the same speed transfer rate and they are both plugged into the laptops direct USB ports as apposed to a USB hub.


Is the speed on the TB down to the file system or just the fact that it is a large capacity and so the head has more work?

[icabod]

Regarding the hardware itself, it depends on how many platters (physical discs) there are inside. My guess would be that the larger drive would have to move the head less in order to store contiguous data.

That said, NTFS has more "features" than FAT32. It is a journalling file system, which means that more information is stored about a file than just the file data itself. This includes some data recovery information, I think.
This could be why you see slower rates on that drive.

That's mostly a guess, tho'.

Are both drives empty?

[casioman]

Originally Posted by icabod:
Regarding the hardware itself, it depends on how many platters (physical discs) there are inside. My guess would be that the larger drive would have to move the head less in order to store contiguous data.

That said, NTFS has more "features" than FAT32. It is a journalling file system, which means that more information is stored about a file than just the file data itself. This includes some data recovery information, I think.
This could be why you see slower rates on that drive.

That's mostly a guess, tho'.

Are both drives empty?

icabod - cheers for your thoughts on this, both drives have information on them and in actual fact, the 500gb drive is down to 100gb whereas the 1TB is down to around 900gb.

[penders]

I would have thought the bottleneck here was the USB (2.0 ?) interface. But that doesn't explain why the two would perform differently. Are the cables the same length?

Are you able to benchmark the two drives?

[hobwebs]

Originally Posted by penders:
I would have thought the bottleneck here was the USB (2.0 ?) interface. But that doesn't explain why the two would perform differently. Are the cables the same length?

Are you able to benchmark the two drives?

I am inclined to agree with penders. Try swapping the cables over if possible. Also bear in mind that some USB-SATA interfaces (i.e. the electronics inside the caddy) are really crappy and are not very good at fast sustained data rates. Even if they were 'made by Iomega' the circuit boards may well be different and made by two different manufacturers.

The only true test would be to swap the drives to each other's caddies and test again.

To be honest I would not try to capture to a USB drive but rather use it as storage/backup.

[casioman]

The cable length for both is the same and they sit next to each other. The cables that I am using came with the drives so I am not using any 3rd party or crappy stuff.

I have no choice but to capture to these drives because as I am using a laptop , the internal drive is always being used by windows. I am merely questioning over the fact that the larger drive is slower than the smaller drive.

Not benchmarked them - do you recommend any free software?

[Trev]

Perhaps the drives are different in other ways also i.e. different manufacturer, different spin speed etc. Without the detailed hardware specs and testing all the potential causes of differences it'd be difficult to pin down the culprit. A simple test to determine the effect of the file system would be to partition both drives and format the new partition with a file system then write the same large file from the PC (large enough to fill the buffer and force a sustained write speed) to both drives one after the other and time each transfer then reformat the partitions with the other file system and repeat the test.

[Malcolm]

Possibly one drive has a fault.

[casioman]

Originally Posted by Malcolm:
Possibly one drive has a fault.

I hope not - the slower one has all my important data on it as well .

I did notice that the larger drive tends to go into standby (if that is the right terminology) when inactive.

If I have time Trev, I will try your suggestion.

[Malcolm]

Originally Posted by casioman:
I hope not - the slower one has all my important data on it as well .

.

The drive may be OK, caddy electronics and connections have problems, can you take the drive out of the caddy and connect it inside a desktop PC, to see if that fixes the problem.