Hard Disk Drive Transfer rates

Hard Drive Throughput Rates

The maxtor external USB Hard Disk Drive [HDD] I just got has a maximum transfer rate of 480Mbps [bits per second]. That transfer speed is based on it's USB interface bus. Both the internal hard drives I use are Serial ATA interfaces, and operate at 150Mbps. These are maximum numbers, not sustained transfer rates over a long transfer operation.

The graphic above shows the increase in transfer rates for the IDE bus and the new Serial ATA [SATA] bus.

Just in case you looked at the numbers, and maybe they seem high for the USB interface, they just my be. The sustained transfer rate for the external HDD is only around 30MBps. I just defrag-ed that hard drive, and it took around 20 minutes, very slow.

FYI; there are also Solid State Drives that are 100% Flash Memory based. Same transfer rates, as the data transfer rates are really based on the electrical interface.