Hi,
I got WD My Passport 1TB external drive to backup my data. The laptop is Dell XPS L501X with 2 USB3.0 ports. Distro is Slackware64 14.1. When I copy files from WD to DELL speed is like 60MB/s and it doesn't matter if the files are large (4GB and more) or small (10MB). I use reiserfs on DELL and ntfs on WD.
I know reiserfs is old but I have never had any problems with it and I've been using it since Slackware 10.2.

lsusb | grep 3.0
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub

/sbin/lspci | grep USB
00:1a.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset USB2 Enhanced Host Controller (rev 06)
00:1d.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset USB2 Enhanced Host Controller (rev 06)
05:00.0 USB controller: NEC Corporation uPD720200 USB 3.0 Host Controller (rev 03)

So, is there a way to increase the speed? I was thinking of changing the filesystem on the WD. It will be used only under Linux OS so maybe I can switch to one of our filesystems. What do you think?

Any thoughts will be appreciated

60 MB/s is about the best speed you'll get with a laptop drive (unless it's a SSD). Your bottleneck is not the cable or ports, it's one (or both) of the actual disk drives.

Thanks for the answer.
So if I connect another USB3.0 and transfer files between that one and the WD is will be faster?

I think from an ordinary laptop (2.5) drive you get about 60 MB/s. From a 3.5 desktop sata drive you can get a few more, sometimes up to 70 MB/s - we're talking sustained thru'put here, not burst or cached. Nothing you do will increase that. You can slow it down by using a junk file system. I find writing to ntfs from linux quite slow. Writing to ext4 or xfs should be quick. Also, if you are copying thousands of small files, it gets slower as it needs to move the head around a bit to update directories. You really get the best speed when you're copying large files (like movies, database backups etc). The only way to get faster is to use multiple disks in stripes. But writing to raid5 is slow. Simple stripe and raid-10 is fine.Point is that your best thu'put will always be only as fast as your biggest bottleneck. Clearly none of this applies to SSD disks.

I think I will mark that as SOLVED. Thanks once again.