Hard Drive Question

[RelicAnderson]

If I buy an external hard drive with USB 3.0 and with USB 3.0 reaching 5 Gbit/s speeds, will the hard drive be the bottle neck? I'm not too sure how fast hard drives read or write, but is it 5 Gb fast? On http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive it says that high rpm (10,000-15,000 rpm) hard drives can achieve up to 1.6 Gbit/s transfer speeds, but this is much less than the 5Gbit/s speed of the USB 3.0. I'm a correct to assume that the hard drive will be my main bottle neck?

Hope this isn't too dumb a question, but I've been wondering about it for a while. Thanks!

 

[joelm3103]

If I buy an external hard drive with USB 3.0 and with USB 3.0 reaching 5 Gbit/s speeds, will the hard drive be the bottle neck? I'm not too sure how fast hard drives read or write, but is it 5 Gb fast? On http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive it says that high rpm (10,000-15,000 rpm) hard drives can achieve up to 1.6 Gbit/s transfer speeds, but this is much less than the 5Gbit/s speed of the USB 3.0. I'm a correct to assume that the hard drive will be my main bottle neck?

Hope this isn't too dumb a question, but I've been wondering about it for a while. Thanks!

Hi and welcome to Tech Forums .

Hmm judging from the info provided, I would say yes. Remember HDD has moving parts inside it, unlike a Solid State Drive (SSD) drive for example, which would lower the transfer rate because of the reading/locating/writing processes. I could be totally wrong there though, and hope to be corrected if I am by any member...but to my logical thinking, that is why.

So yes, your HDD would be the bottleneck in this situation.
Also no question is too dumb , once your learning something, it's off some relevance .

 

[Peter.Cort]

Also most of the time that advertised file transfer speed is under optimal settings with no other parts included. You rarely get 3gb/s from HDD to HDD (sata) so you won't get super fast speeds, but yes you'll be limited by the HDD, but still if and when you upgrade to a SATAII drive(s) you'll be prepped for faster speeds.