HACKER Q&A
📣 yonz

SSD File Transfer Speeds


Why do file transfer speed run at 1/5th to 1/10th the quoted maximum read and write speeds?

Researching online, you can get an SSD that supports 7,000+ MB/s read/write speeds and top out at 3,000MB/s for a USB4 enclosure. But I only find people getting 1GB/s transfer speeds for regular setups (without enclosure).

Why are benchmarks and file transfer speeds so different? Are there any sites that track transfer speeds? Where would you start debugging this?

  👤 wmf Accepted Answer ✓
SSDs generally need parallel accesses ("queue depth" greater than 1) to get high performance but most software generates serial I/O.