MacBook Pro File Transfer Rates

Macs are not known for fast file transfer rates via USB 3 ports. I was really frustrated with a couple of my Western Digital Portable HDDs as they seemed to take forever to transfer files to and from them and my MacBook Pro 15" Retina 2014. So I bought a SanDisk Extreme 500 Portable SSD and found it was a lot faster than the HDD, as in 4+ times faster. I tested several external storage devices and cards I have, and listed them in order of speed. To test I copied a folder of files containing 3.37 GB of information from my MBP's internal SSD to the external storage devices/cards, and of course recorded the transfer time. All USB devices were attached to the USB 3 port via a USB 3 cable or connector. The two SD Cards were plugged into the MBP built-in card reader. Here are the results:

• 372.4 MB/s, MBP 15" Retina 2014 Internal SSD 250GB
• 174.3 MB/s, SanDisk Extreme 500 Portable SSD (SDSSDEXT-250G-G25) 250GB
• 71.0 MB/s, SanDisk Extreme Pro SDXC UHS-I Class 10 V30 (U3) 95MB/s Card 64GB
• 43.6 MB/s, WD My Passport Portable HDD (WDBKKF0020BSL-NESN) 2TB
• 27.7 MB/s, WD My Passport Portable HDD (WDBCGL0020BSL-NESN) 2TB
• 22.5 MB/s, Samsung USB Flash Drive (MUF-64BB/AM) 64GB
• 13.8 MB/s, SanDisk Ultra SDHC UHS-I Class 10 80MB/s Card 32GB

Interesting results. I assumed the SanDisk Extreme 500 Portable SSD would blow away the two portable HDDs, but I didn't think the SanDisk Extreme Pro SDXC card would also blow them out of the water.

[kyteflyer]

Remember that those portables are only 5400 rpm, too, so they really are as slow as a wet week. I was using one as my backup drive with SuperDuper! And it was not worth continuing. The USB2 desktop WD Elements drive was faster. .

Only just found out today that WD bought Sandisk.

[mariosipad]

Originally Posted by jswinden

...... To test I copied a folder of files containing 3.37 GB of information from my MBP's internal SSD to the external storage devices/cards, and of course recorded the transfer time. ........

To copy a lot of small files to a HDD is waaaay slower than to a SSD or a fast card. The access times of the latter two is much lower, thus perceived writing speed is much higher.

Try to test with one 1 Gb file. Then you will see that the transfer speed of the portable HDD is (up to 4x) higher than what you tested.

Originally Posted by mariosipad

To copy a lot of small files to a HDD is waaaay slower than to a SSD or a fast card. The access times of the latter two is much lower, thus perceived writing speed is much higher.

Try to test with one 1 Gb file. Then you will see that the transfer speed of the portable HDD is (up to 4x) higher than what you tested.

Why would I test with a file size I rarely, if ever, transfer? I used for my test the file sizes and types that I normally backup to my external drives. I use these external drives as backups and to transport files to other locations/computers. In a real world scenario, I bet I've never transferred any file anywhere near 1GB in size.

Originally Posted by kyteflyer

Remember that those portables are only 5400 rpm, too, so they really are as slow as a wet week. I was using one as my backup drive with SuperDuper! And it was not worth continuing. The USB2 desktop WD Elements drive was faster. .

Only just found out today that WD bought Sandisk.

I need the HDDs to be portable. I use them for backups, but I also use them to transport files to other locations and computers on occasion. Most of what I need them for is related to my photography hobby, so a lot of traveling with external storage takes place. I suspect if I wanted to have the fastest external file transfers, a high speed ethernet or even 5G wireless network storage system would be the way to go. However, I work with the files on my MBP's internal SSD, then when finished with whatever I was doing with them, I will back them up to an external location or two for safe keeping.

The main times I notice the slow transfer is when I need to transfer a few hundred large photo files, usually TIFFs and around 144MB each, to a Windows 10 computer to use aligning and stacking software that is not available for Macs. That is the main reason I bought the SanDisk Extreme 500 SSD. I think it will work very well in that roll.

I do use one of the 2TB USB 3 WD HDDs for Time Machine backups of my MBP. And yes it is snail on Valium slow! But I can plug it into my MBP and let it run the backup in the background, so it is not to bad. I only do Time Machine backups about once a week, so it isn't a major issue.

I didn't know WD bought out SanDisk. I hope that doesn't degrade the SanDisk quality. I've always had good luck from SanDisk cards. I usually have good luck with WD drives, but there have been some incidents in the past that left me frustrated.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by jswinden

I use these external drives as backups and to transport files to other locations/computers. In a real world scenario, I bet I've never transferred any file anywhere near 1GB in size.

My main use for external drives is to store video files, almost all of which are >1GB in size .

Originally Posted by HarryT

My main use for external drives is to store video files, almost all of which are >1GB in size .

Well good for you Harry. But I don't transfer huge files like that, so in my case it would have been inaccurate to test with such big files.

[kyteflyer]

Originally Posted by jswinden

I need the HDDs to be portable.

I don't *need* portable, but I was hoping to use them for backups to reduce the number of power bricks laying about in the study. I think SSD is probably the only sane alternative. A fellow I know on a local Mac forum uses one as his main boot drive because its faster than the internal. and he uses the internal as the backup/clone. SSDs are getting cheaper now, so its not beyond the bounds of possibility to have a couple of 2TB drives for the backups and a 540 for the clone boot drive.

I didn't know WD bought out SanDisk.

Yeah, only found out because I was cruising the WD site looking at their NASes and there it was in small print at the bottom of a page. Cant remember which, though.

I hear you on all the wall warts and AC plug-in devices! My study/radio shack (I'm an amateur radio operator - ham) has way too much plugged in already what with all my radios and computer equipment. I use the portable HDDs as backups and occasionally as temporary storage. My MBP only has a 256GB internal drive, and I find it starts to slow down if the available space on that drive falls below 100GB. So I keep most of my photography stuff on backup storage so I always have plenty of space available on the MBP's internal SSD.

I also find that the MBP will often slow down if I plug in one of the WD portable HDDs. My testing with the portable 256GB SSD plugged in does not show any slow down of the MBP, at least so far. So that is good. Plus the SSD is fast enough that I can place my photos for a collection on it, link to it via Lightroom CC 2015 or Capture One Pro 10, and do all the post processing without taking a speed hit. Basically I'm using the MBP for the processing of photos stored on the SanDisk portable SSD. If I did that with the WD portable HDDs, Lightroom would crawl along at a snails pace and Capture One Pro 10 would slow down quite a bit too. After I finish doing my post processing, I backup everything to other storage drives and unplug the SSD drive.

[HarryT]

I'm a keen photographer too, Jack, as you may be aware, and I too use Lightroom as my primary photo processing and cataloging tool. Do you think LR is particularly sensitive to disk speed? I have my LR library on an external 4TB USB drive (in a USB2 port, in fact) and LR runs absolutely fine. I've always considered that what it really wants is lots of RAM: it dramatically sped up for "develop" operations when I went from a laptop with 4GB RAM to one with 16GB.

Originally Posted by HarryT

I'm a keen photographer too, Jack, as you may be aware, and I too use Lightroom as my primary photo processing and cataloging tool. Do you think LR is particularly sensitive to disk speed? I have my LR library on an external 4TB USB drive (in a USB2 port, in fact) and LR runs absolutely fine. I've always considered that what it really wants is lots of RAM: it dramatically sped up for "develop" operations when I went from a laptop with 4GB RAM to one with 16GB.

I suspect LR wants more and faster RAM more than faster file read/write speed. I think the issues I'm having with slow downs is more isolated to the two WD portable HDDs I've tried using. Both slow down my MBP simply by plugging them in. Everything seems to slow down, not just LR. I think they are the issue, not really LR. I have a MBP 15" Retina mid-2014 with 16GB of RAM and i7 processors, so I'm maxed out on RAM. However, when I use the SanDisk SSD drive I don't see any slow down. The two WD HDDs are USB 3, but they are the slower 5400 RPM models and not the 7200 RPM models.