I say, good afternoon! I'm in the process of transferring my Steam folder from a 3TB Seagate in a USB 3.0 external adapter, hooked up by USB 3.0 cable but to a USB 2.0 socket, onto an identical hard drive inside the machine. Couple of questions though: 1. When I started this, why did my system not recognise the external drive on the USB 3.0 socket, but only on the USB 2.0, no matter which ones I used? Is it to do with having previously had it hooked up to a USB 2.0 socket (and maybe formatted via the same) on another machine initially? 2. Why did my transfer speeds start out at ~12MB/s, but have now dropped to ~8MB/s as the copy has gone on, especially since USB 2.0 is capable of a supposed 60MB/s less overhead?
I would definitely check the adaptor manufacturer's website for an updated driver, you do not want to be transferring large files over USB 2 as you have seen for yourself, it is painfully slow, I am happy to get 2MB/s - 4MB/s on a usb 2 flash drive, your speed is likely the top usb 2 speed I doubt it will ever go faster. Transferring a steam folder may take days. Assuming windows os, unplug the external storage device and open up device manager, then plug it back into the computer via usb, it should either try to install or otherwise come up as an unrecognised device in the list, it will be clearly marked with a yellow warning exclamation mark. In this case I would manually download the latest driver and install, if it doesn't show up try and rescan or unplug/replug again. Also, what kind of adaptor are you using, 3TB disk is 3.5"? If you use one of the SSD cloning dongles it may not be able to supply enough power to any HDD drive let alon a 3.5" one, if it has an external power cable or a special double usb cable make sure they are all plugged in.
If I am reading this you are connecting the seagate to a usb2 port on the PC? If this is the case then you will only ever get USB 2 speeds. You could have the fastest device in the world, but the controller will only handle 480Mbps theoretical maximum I have never seen speeds that high though. Remember as well that the time taken to transfer 1024 x 1MB files will be longer the 1 x 1024 MB file, and the steam folder is guaranteed to be a lot of small files. Can you not plug the PCs onto a gigabit switch and transfer them across the network, or plug the old hard drive into the board SATA ports and do a disk to disk transfer it will be miles faster than USB, or in my experience it is anyway...
That is a good point I forgot, there are no native USB 3 drivers on Windows 7 or below, if you are running this you must get your chipset/add in card usb3 driver before doing anything and sounds like the most likely cause of any issue you are facing.
