Thursday, August 9, 2012

USB 3.0 Speed test

Just a random speed test between different peripherals

Peripherals: 
Samsung 830 128GB SSD
Western Digital 80GB internal SATA HDD
Astone External Enclosure with Western Digital Caviar Green 3TB SATA HDD USB3.0
Seagate Goflex Desktop 1TB External HDD USB2.0 

System:
HP DC7800 Small Form Factor
Intel E8400 3.0 Ghz
4GB PC6400 DDR2
Intel Q35 Motherboard
Window 7 Ultimate 64 bits
ATI HD 6570

Test file: Single 2.5GB MP4 file

Sampling: Transfer rate (MB/s) was recorded once the speed has stagnant



It seems like my computer is utilizing the new USB 3.0 PCIe pretty well. Whenever I transfer from local hard drives to external USB 3.0, I can easily achieve 100 - 130 MB/s, which is about 3 to 4 times faster than the USB 2.0. This gives me more reason to upgrade my current Seagate Goflex desktop to USB 3.0. 

Worth to mention that, SSD burst speed is significantly faster than normal spinning hard drive, I could easily reach 400MB/s in the beginning of the transfer. I cannot help but address that SSD can make any old computer a beast. If you are still using Core 2 Duo or Core 2 Quad and want a performance boost, SSD is the way to go.

By the way, I did similar speed test in Window Vista 32 bit before. I tested the transfer speed of internal spinning hard drive to USB 3.0. I managed to achieve a pathetic 50MB/s in the previous test. This may due to several reasons: (1) Window 7 is optimized to USB 3.0 (2) Spinning hard drive with OS is running slower than spinning hard drive without OS.