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USB2 vs USB3


mobilenvidia

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Enough of Steve Jobs and there are no new drivers to be seen, do something else.

A friend of mine needed a USB storage device he could take on the road with him

I bought him a Western Digital Passport Essential 3 with a 750GB HDD and it was USB3, the drive being powered by the USB slot would be ideal for the road.

But alas he changed his mind on travelling and I'm stuck with it.

My first thought was to pull it apart and take the drive and put it in my Venerable Dell D820.

But to my horror instead of a SATA/USB3 interface inside the case the HDD actually has the USB3 interface built in.

So this drive will NOT fit in a laptop :(

I was not impressed making the drive even less appealing at first.

But it does allow me to test the speed of USB3 vs USB2 and to see if it's worth while.

So below are a couple of comparisons of the Drive either plugged in a USB3 port or a USB2 port all very simple.

I allowed the drivers to install, formatted the drive, set it to performance in device properties, then rebooted.

Here we go:

USB2 HDTach

usb2_hdtach_test.png

USB2 Atto

usb2_atto_test.png

Not hard to see the USB2 interface is bottlenecked and we get nothing more than 30/35MB/s Write/Read

This a few years ago was all good and dandy, but these days with many GB to transfer at once, a little tedious.

Time to speed things up with USB3

USB3 HDTach

usb3_hdtach_test.png

USB3 Atto

usb3_atto_test.png

Much more like it now the USB3 interface is no longer a bottle neck.

From the above burst speed in USB3 the interface looks to be good for 166MB/s

Keeping in mind the WD Passport drive is a 5400RPM drive so the performance is not too bad.

The 7200RPM (sata only ?) will do better but will still not saturate the USB3 interface.

With this drive, the performance has tripled for both Write and Reads (a it less at the end of the disk), this is quite impressive.

And file copies, or backups should see significant increases in speed.

I'll keep it to put backups on, actually something I should be doing for a long time, after the big crash of 2010.

Hope the above was of use, to those who are tinkering with the idea of USB3 as it becomes mainstream

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And If you plug USB 2.0 device in USB 3.0 port it will miraculously gain more speed :)

That's because new USB 3.0 controllers are more perfect than old ones. My tests with 10 devices (HDDs and thumbdrives) showed that you can expect 5-30% gain on linear operations (mostly HDDs) and 25-50% gain to random access (flash memory only).

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Good point, yesterday was the very first time I used the Blue USB3 socket on my Mobo.

I can't test the same drive in a USB2 enclosure but I can test another.

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They have still some work to do - my external eSATA disk does about 20 MB/s more. It's faster than my internal 7200 rpm drives.

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Yes, Its is very effective information for newbie.. Which doesn't know this thing before. Thanks for sharing this worthy information with us.

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