Transferring Files Between Two External HDD Drives

[Subtitles]

I needed to transfer about 1TB of videos between two external HDD drives with USB 3 interface (blue USB connector)
My new computer has on the rear of the motherboard (according to the MB user guide) four USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports with blue colours and two USB 3.2 Gen 2 (with green colour)
The green connectors are supposed to be faster than the blue and are are backward compatible.
But when I connected the two HDD's to these connectors, the transfer rate was miserably slow and it would take 1 day to complete the transfer.
I shut down the PC, connected the HDD cables to two adjacent pair of USB blue connectors and the transfer rate is now what I expected fluctuating between 30MB/s to 90MB/s and it should finish the transfer in about 3-4 hours.
I also disconnected all other external HDD's and in both cases I had only the two specific HDD drives.

My question is why the green coloured ports were so slow?

[thecoalman]

Transfer speeds are dependent on what you are transferring. Many small files take a lot longer than one large file.

[krykmoon]

My question is why the green coloured ports were so slow?

Maybe the two Hard Disk are connected to the same controller ?

What is the transfer rate using the blue connectors VS the green connectors ? How many different controllers (green connectors/blue connectors) do you have on your Motherboard ?

If you have only a road connecting two points.. and there are cars coming/going from/to both those two opposite points......

[ProWo]

I needed to transfer about 1TB of videos between two external HDD drives with USB 3 interface (blue USB connector)
My new computer has on the rear of the motherboard (according to the MB user guide) four USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports with blue colours and two USB 3.2 Gen 2 (with green colour)

According to Wikipedia:

Black or White = USB 1.x or USB 2.0.
Blue = USB 3.0
Teal blue = USB 3.1.
Yellow, Orange or Red = USB 3.2 (high current/sleep-n-charge ports).

[johnmeyer]

Make a temporary folder on each external hard drive. Then, copy a few GB of files from your hard drive to the temporary folder on one of the external drives. Measure the time. Then, when that is finished, do the same thing with the second external drive. Are both copy times approximately the same? If not, then there may be an issue with either a cable, the drive, or the USB port.

Lots of really small files can take forever, as already stated.

You do, of course, need to use a UBS 3 cable. That is a very likely culprit.

If you have another computer, preferably one running a different operating system, you could try that. If you have a Linux DVD boot disc lying around, you could boot the computer to Linux and try the copy. This would help determine if the problem is Windows, or is your hardware/cabling.

[jagabo]

Make sure one (some?) of the drives aren't shingled. Those are very slow for large writes.