For how long are you using your External HDD ? Which brand is it ?

[sudodus]

@mastablasta,

In the actual case you have to benchmark the devices to get accurate results, because there can be many bottlenecks.

As a general statement, yes, the USB 3 connection can be quite fast, and I have a good experience from running the operating system from an SSD via USB 3.

[uninvolved]

I have a couple of 1 tb WD drives that must be 10 years old by now. One has a couple hundred sectors gone bad - but it has been at that level for years.

They get used fairly often - but are old enough that they don't get used for anything truly essential. They get rotated around and spend time on-site and off-site as a part of my backup process. In my case, I have ample backups, so if those drives go south it's unlikely to be a major issue - so long as it is caught within a 30 day period (which it should be).

I have no idea how they've managed to last this long.

This is the worst of the two:
http://pix.toile-libre.org/upload/or...1593884501.png

Like I said, I have no idea how it has lasted as long as it has. As you can see, it stays powered on quite a bit.

[kurt18947]

is USB 3 as fast as SATA3 (transfer speed)? i tried to get this information in wiki and it seem like they have simlar speed. i see there are external SSD drives available and nvme drives with almost double transfer speed of SSD drive. pricey, but fast. might solve the issue for laptops with small drives (256 GB) and no expansion slot in them.

I have an NVMe drive on an Asrock MoBo. The NVMe doesn't 'feel' much faster in daily use than a SATA III SSD. I'm just an ordinary desktop user, no large file transfers which is one place NVMe is supposed to shine. The size difference should be a big help on portable devices. It'll be interesting to see how much difference PCIe 4 will make.