Anybody try USB3 yet?

[walter.sk]

I've got 6 external Maxtor One-touch 4 USB 2 500Gb drives which have been working well for several years (3 for data and 3 for backup).  My wife has need of external storage, and on her mini-Mac she cannot upgrade to USB3 so I am considering giving her my drives, getting a USB 3.0 card for my Win7-64 machine, and upgrading to 3 2Tb drives for picture files and backup.

I'm using a Dell XPS 730 2.4GHz quad-core with 8Gb memory.  I'm crimped in the wallet, so I'm looking to do this inexpensively yet increase the speed of my external drives.  There are three alternatives that I see:

1) Getting something like Seagate or Western Digital 2Tb drives and external enclosures, which would come to roughly $200 per drive/enclosure combo;

2) Getting ready-made external 2Tb drives that are designed for USB3.0 (About the same cost).

3) Getting Seagate Freeagent Goflex (or semthing like that) drives that are USB 2.0 but with an option of a USB3.0  base, also about the same cost.

My sense is that I could provide better (cooler operating) external cases than those in the ready-made external drives.

A question:  Is the upper limit of USB3 such that if I get one of the 5400rpm or 5900 rpm drives by Seagate or WD, still rated at the 3GB transfer rate, going to slow down the results compared with a drive 7200 rpm 3GB transfer rate?

Are there other considerations I'm missing?  I cannot afford one of the multi-drive enclosures, with or without raid capabilities.

Or, should I stay with USB 2?

[John.Murray]

why not esata?

[ImplantImages]

No not yet the only device I've seen for it is an external HDD from LaCie, has any body seen a card reader for it yet USB 2 seems like forever these days.

[walter.sk]

No not yet the only device I've seen for it is an external HDD from LaCie, has any body seen a card reader for it yet USB 2 seems like forever these days.

Provantage has quite a list of devices ranging from cables to converters, drives to enclosures.  Go to their site and type in USB 3.0 Superspeed, and you'll come up with several pages of items.

Provantage

[sbunting108]

Nope I haven't tryed USB3 yet but I am looking forward to

[duranash]

Going back to John Murray's question.....why not eSata?  I ask because I'm in the market for an external HD and have been wondering if eSata isn't the best way to go.  Anybody have any issues/concerns with eSata HDD's?

[MattBeardsley]

I'm running a MacGurus 4-bay box with an eSATA card in a Mac Pro... the drives are in two 3 TB RAID combos and backed up with ChronoSync, which has worked perfectly for me.  MacGurus is a great place to go for memory and back up..  the eSATA connection seems great.  I don't know about USB3.0

[Wayne Fox]

Going back to John Murray's question.....why not eSata?  I ask because I'm in the market for an external HD and have been wondering if eSata isn't the best way to go.  Anybody have any issues/concerns with eSata HDD's?

been running an eSata external raid 5 (8 TB hardware raid from OWC for under $1k) for a while now on my MacPro ... solid and fast. 

[BernardLanguillier]

Have you seen this?

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3858/the-worlds-first-3tb-hdd-seagate-goflex-desk-3tb-review

Cheers,
Bernard

[francois]

Have you seen this?

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3858/the-worlds-first-3tb-hdd-seagate-goflex-desk-3tb-review

Cheers,
Bernard

Interesting read, thanks for sharing.

[abaazov]

Hi, i have installed usb3, tried it out. i also have esata. usb3 wins hands down, no contest. i can post some speed tests if anyone is interested, but usb2 is useless compared to usb3, and esata is fast but usb3 much faster.
amnon

[fike]

I have used a seagate USB3 laptop-class hard drive. Subjectively-speaking, it is dramatically faster than USB2.  I recall looking at specs and seeing that eSATA and USB3 were fairly comparable, though USB3 was a bit more fault tolerant (hotswapping, drivers, etc...)

[Farmer]

Hi, i have installed usb3, tried it out. i also have esata. usb3 wins hands down, no contest. i can post some speed tests if anyone is interested, but usb2 is useless compared to usb3, and esata is fast but usb3 much faster.
amnon

I'd love to see some speed tests, please.  I'm not sure how a SATA HDD could be faster when connected by USB3 than when connected natively (ie SATA or eSATA).

[abaazov]

Test computer: i7-940@2.93ghz, 12Gb ram, win7 64-bit

one hard drive, seagate goflex pro 500G (it has usb2, usb3 and esata output)

Test software: Everest Ultimate Edition

usb2:
linear read-36.3 Mb/s (always average)
average read access-16.9ms
buffered read-35.3 Mb/s

usb3:
linear read-98.8 Mb/s
average read access-16.1ms
buffered read-101 Mb/s

I don't have my esata cable here, but if i remember the esata results were right in the middle of these two.

Amnon

[John.Murray]

I've seen a lot of "hard drive" performance utilities that:

1) get fooled by O/S file caching or other filesystem optimizations
2) ignore the actual partitions and instead use the capacity reported by bios for calculations
2) instead of reading and writing actual data - they simply report hd controller capabilities

In the case of the Seagate Goflex - inside lies a 7200rpm Sata2 notebook drive.  If we are copying small files, then who knows what the results would be?  How about copying 10 100mb files using the 3 interfaces (running windows?  please turn off cached writes), or better yet run iometer.

http://iometer.org/