usb 3.0 EXTREMELY slow transfer rates

The eSata results are interesting. I got a 30% better performance with USB3 than USB2 when imaging a 40GB partition with Macrium. The disk I used is a 5400 RPM model that I reovered from a laptop when I put the SSD in.
I am now looking for a cheap SSD with 200+ MB/sec write speed to try that out.

Mike Connor said:

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The USB 3.0 ports on my machine work fine and with the right device everything is pretty fast. However, no device has yet been as fast as my eSATA ports.

I also tried a few add in cards on various machines, some worked great, others less so, and every drive is of course different.

I will stick with eSATA for the nonce for my personal machine.


Regards....Mike Connor

I haven't had any PCs with esata to try. I'm lazy so I buy the off the shelf towers. :)

It is kind of strange. I remember seeing a video from BlacX docking station about their new USB 3.0 docks. It showed a file transfer of a 700 MB video file. First they did with USB 2.0 then 3.0 dock. The 3.0 dock only looked about 3 times faster from the progress bar. When I purchased the USB 3.0 stuff I figured if I got the 3x result like in the video I'd be happy. Pleasantly surprised when I plugged in the new Caviar Black 6 Gb 64 KB cache drives and got about 5x performance compared to the 2.0 dock. One of those nice times when it wasn't as advertised but better. :)

I am still confused about what some people say that eSata ia a lot faster than USB3. Both attachment options have a lot more data transfer capability than a spinning disk can supply. So it should be the disks that limit the speed and not the attachment. Could it be a difference in the capability of the enclosures?

whs said:

I am still confused about what some people say that eSata ia a lot faster than USB3. Both attachment options have a lot more data transfer capability than a spinning disk can supply. So it should be the disks that limit the speed and not the attachment. Could it be a difference in the capability of the enclosures?

There is CPU overhead and such involved over the USB bus. I use eSATA at work and at home and I get speeds of over 100MB/sec throughout most of my Samsung SpinPoint 7200 RPM 2TB hard drive.

I've seen posts from people online that got about 20-25MB/sec over USB 2, then around 60-70MB/sec over USB 3 and nearly 90MB/sec over eSATA using the same hard drive and just moving it from enclosure to enclosure.

Yeah, but how much CPU overhead can there be. On the system where I have both eSata and USB3 ports, I have an i7 processor. Do you think the CPU could make such a big difference?

I have a USB3 enclosure but not an eSata enclosure. But if it were worth my money, would buy one. That's why I am so interested in the subject.

The enclosure that I use is a Thermaltake BlacX. Newegg.com - Thermaltake BlacX ST0005U External Hard Drive SATA Enclosure Docking Station 2.5” & 3.5” USB 2.0 & eSATA

I've seen it as low as $20 at NewEgg when on sale.

As far as the comments about CPU overhead, I recall this being a main issue between FireWire and USB 2. Firewire is often faster as it requires less CPU overhead.

Thanks. That looks like a nice enclosure. I'll keep an eye on it.