USB3 - hands on!

[GTFO. kk20]

Ive had USB3 on my mobo and never used it. I needed a new external drive to back things up onto so I bought a 2tb USB3 drive. It was pretty much the same price as all the other USB2 drives so I thought what the hell.

I would say it is not much slower than my internal drive (looking at the average rather than burst). HDTach seems to back that up. So it seems that USB3 isnt just a gimmick.

USB3

drive on SATA

[GTFO. TommyBoy]

Try it with HD Tune mate, it's up to date. HD Tach is ancient and I wouldn't trust it on modern drives.

[GTFO. kk20]

pretty much the same

SATA

USB3

[GTFO. TommyBoy]

burst rate is a good bit lower, but HD Tune uses 64bits default to test where HD Tach uses 8mb.

[GTFO. kk20]

I think even usb3 is hitting the wall as I imagine the top graph is typical for a platter drive - faster on the outside and slower on the inside. On the USB 3 you dont see the max speed on the outside.

I ran this on my SSD but got really weird results, it was like a sawtooth graph varying wildly from 250 to 80 - I *know* the SSD is quicker than the HDD as it runs noticeably faster.

[r3loaded]

You do have to bear in mind that USB's architecture means that it's dependent on the CPU to handle transmission and scheduling, rather than having a dedicated controller chip as with SATA or Thunderbolt. Hence, you'll see more erratic performance with random workloads.