The SATA-III interface, also known as SATA 3 or SATA 6B/s interface limits the transfer rate to about 550 MB/s. SATA-III SSDĪ solid state disk (SSD), at least with most models nowadays, can usually reach the limit of the SATA-III interface. You can stripe multiple drives to achieve faster speeds but in most cases, the bottleneck will be the drive itself. SATA HDDĪ hard disk drive (HDD) uses one ore more rotating disks (platters) and due to the way the data is stored and accessed, such a drive is usually limited to a transfer rate of about 100-200 MB/s. In addition, there are certain limitations depending on the type of drive and its interface. The transfer speed can vary a lot depending on the drive model, even if it's the same type of drive, so it's always a good idea to check the specifications first and if possible, refer to an actual test result with that particular drive. Hard Disk Drives (HDD) and Solid State Drives (SSD)

To better understand what might be slowing down your drive and how you can improve the data transfer rate to get better speeds, we will look at each of the components separately. In this article, we are going to identify the bottleneck of external storage drives and attempt to get the best possible data transfer speed out of your Akitio product.

Usb 2 vs usb 3 external hard drive