page-7 | DriveStation USB 3.0 HD-HXU3 | Accessories

DriveStation USB 3.0 HD-HXU3 - Test - MB/s

Wednesday, 24 February 2010 18:41 Laptopfreak

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Article Index
DriveStation USB 3.0 HD-HXU3
The technology behind USB 3.0
Specifications
What the package contains
Software
Test setup
Test - MB/s
Test - IOPS
Conclusion
All Pages

Page 7 of 9

Test - MB/s

Before we examine the results there are a few things we need to look at.

The difference between bit and byte
The manufacturers usually state their speeds in bit, but people (and our test results) generally talk about bytes. As such you have to be aware that 1 byte is the same as 8 bit, so there is a pretty big difference you ought to note.

Why USB cannot reach the theoretical maximum performance
There has always been the problem of making USB backwards-compatible, and since it can only work one unit at a time, that means the slowest unit can be a bottleneck. Think of it like a highway with fast and slow cars; if there are too many cars, there is no advantage to driving a fast car because you cannot reach your maximum speed due to congestion.
There is also a small overhead that means USB 2.0 is rarely observed performing greater than 30 MB/s in the real world.
We ran a test in which we took a Kingston SSDNow V+ G2 and put it in an external cabinet. Connected via USB 2.0, the average rate achieved in Crystal Diskmark was 29.4 MB/s. Connected via USB 3.0, we reached a rate of 38.7 MB/s. That is a whopping 30% rate increase without us having to invest in new cabinets for the hard drive.

Crystal Diskmark - USB 2.0

(Click on the picture)

The drive performs quite well, but not exceptionally so for a USB 2.0 external drive. There is a 3.5” drive within the cabinet that ensures high performance and capacity.

Crystal Diskmark - USB 3.0

(Click on the picture)

We start to see some exciting results; the drive tops around 120MB/s, which is what you can expect of a 3.5” drive. I believe the drive is the bottleneck here, not USB 3.0.
4K read is not improved from USB 2.0 to USB 3.0, as that is also a limitation of the drive.

HD Tune Read

(Click on the picture)

Once again the results from Crystal Diskmark are confirmed, with the average rate over the entire drive reaching almost 100 MB/s, which is about 4 times faster than with the USB 2.0 drives we have previously tested.
We also see the large differences in rates when we compare with connecting via USB 2.0.

HD Tune Write

(Click on the picture)

Read and write are quite similar when it comes to HDD – it is only with SSD and other flash-based storage you see large differences in read and write speeds.