Hi everyone,
I would like to know if it is normal to experience 10MB/s data transfer rates during copying between partitions on my local hard drives (Toshiba 250GB 5400rpm SATA) while having three times faster (30MB/s) transfer rates between local partitions and USB drives (Kingston 8GB).

Thank You all very much in advance.

Stefano

I'm not sure if the specific transfer rate is normal or not, but it being a bit slow should be normal.

A normal harddrive (i.e. not a Solid State Drive) has a physical disc and a "pickup" like an old recordplayer. So when it reads or writes to/from the disk the pickup goes to the place where the data is and reads or writes it. So when you copy from one place on the harddrive to another the pickup has to move back and forth between the two locations making the transfer speed lower than the actual speed of the harddrive.

When you instead copy to a USB drive from the harddrive the pickup can stay in the same place and read all the data with little or no movement which makes this process faster.

I hope this helps :-)

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