SEI8 slower USB-C speed than expected

patrickparks1

Hello,

Recently purchased a Beelink SEI8, 8279u model.   It's installed now wih Windows 11 and working great for me.

However, i happen to have an external NVMe 10Gbps enclosure with 1TB Crucial NVme drive installed in it.     When connected via USB-C cable to front of my SEI8, the file transfer starts super fast for first couple of GB's, then slows down to 40MB/sec.   I do have the device set for faster performance with write-caching enabled in Windows.

My external enclosure can also attach via a standard USB 3.1 cable.   Testing that enclosure using a USB 3 cable, my file transfer ran continuously at 400MB/sec.


Anybody know of any drivers, or settings in the BIOS that might improve the peformance of the USB-C port for file transfers?

beelink

Hi, dear
You said that the file transfer starts very fast in the first few GB and then slows down to 40MB/sec, the reason for this problem is not related to BIOS settings, it may be that the first few GB files you transfer are large files and the files transferred later become small fragmented files, when transferring small files, the slowdown may be related to the 4K random read speed of the hard drive, you can try to transfer large files like movies to test and check if the speed will slow down

patrickparks1

I am copying single files.  They are 8-10GB ISO files and 40-60GB VMDX files.   They start out over 1,000MB/sec and then dwindle down to 40MB/sec for the remainder of the file.     

This only happens on my USB-C connection on my Beelink PC.   On my other computer with USB-C, I get 1000MB/s + on the entire file transfer.

beelink

patrickparks1 replied at 2021-11-04 05:56
I am copying single files.  They are 8-10GB ISO files and 40-60GB VMDX files.   They start out over  ...

Sorry, can you share a picture of the speed when transferring data? I need to send the picture to our technician to check it.

patrickparks1

Yeah, here you go.  I am copying a 4.4GB Windows 10 ISO file from the C drive of the Beelink SEI8, to my external NVMe drive via a USB-C cable plugged into the front port.
It does the first 3GB's or so of the file in the 1+GBps range, but then slows down to 40MB/sec.


After doing some more testing, this is coming down to Windows write caching.   The fast part above is windows write caching grabbing the file, but it drops to 40MB per second when it's actually dumping to the external NVMe drive itself via the USB-C port on the SEI8.

For whatever reason, when my external drive is plugged into the USB-C port, and I run crystal disk bench, I only get 42MB/sec.   



However, if I plug that same drive into one of the regular USB ports on the Beelink, I get what I would expect from a 5Gbps USB 3.x port


When i benchmark this same external NVMe drive on my regular desktop with an Asus Rog Strix X570-E mobo which has 10Gbps USB 3.2Gen 2 ports and I use the USB-C port, i see the following:



So, something is way off on the USB-C port on the front of the SEI8, it's certainly not transferring data at 5Gbps.

beelink

patrickparks1 replied at 2021-11-10 03:04
Yeah, here you go.  I am copying a 4.4GB Windows 10 ISO file from the C drive of the Beelink SEI8, t ...

Hello Dear.
I asked our technicians and they told me that the USB-C port on the front of the SEI8 is not USB3.0 but USB2.0, so it can't reach 5Gbps speed.

patrickparks1

Well, that would explain it.   Okay, that's fine.  Would have been nice to have had better speeds, but I can use the regular USB 3 ports.

Thanks for the update.