Best external storage performance - USB or Ethernet?

Datass · 26 Jul 2015 at 12:57

Hey all,

I'm looking to migrate my HDD's out of my rig to clear up some space for a pump and I've come across two possible solutions - either an External USB 3.0 caddy or a NAS.

I'm wondering would be best from a performance standpoint? I regularly backup, stream and share files off the drives so performance is key.

Would I be right in assuming the USB would be the better option over say a gigabit NAS? Or will the usb 3.0 controller on the enclosure be a bottleneck?

Theoretical throughputs would put USB3.0(600MBps) ahead of gigabit ethernet(100MBps) but I'm not sure if there's more to it than this, can ethernet or USB queue multiple transfers? Are the 3.0 controllers on cheapo enclosures rated for anywhere near that? What's the performance like on small files transfers over ethernet? :confused:

Anyone got a cheapo usb 3.0 enclosure? how does it run?

Nasher · 27 Jul 2015 at 12:00

USB 3.0 will be much faster.

Datass · 27 Jul 2015 at 14:41

Yeah that's what I was thinking, some of the reviews on amazon were throwing me off. People saying they were getting 6MBps transfer speeds, I didn;t know if that was just because they were transferring a bunch of small files and the HDD was struggling to keep up or it was the usb controller choking. Wasn't sure what impact encoding a bunch of small files would have on the usb controller on the device I bought.

I went ahead and picked one up anyway, I'll be able to bench it when it arrives

melvis · 27 Jul 2015 at 19:34

just to mention, gigabit ethernet is not 100MBps its 1000Mbps (125MBps) which is enough to max out all but the highest performing Hard drives still theoretically much slower than USB3 but as long as your not sticking an SSD in there or raiding hard drives shouldnt make much difference

Datass · 29 Jul 2015 at 01:06

Yeah, meant to type Mbps instead of MBps.

I was thinking about the nas but my main rigs single ethernet is connected to a homeplug which means I'd have to either connect the nas to the router, which would have to share the limited 70Mbps i get with my homeplugs OR I'd have to get one with a ethernet pass-through and put it in between my desktop and homeplug.

couldn't see a decent pass through nas for cheap so I just grabbed a usb enclosure. Should do all I need it to

Datass · 1 Aug 2015 at 15:30

Welp, that was a disappointment, seems there's pretty significant overhead on this controller. There's enough bandwidth just seems to have a big performance hit over USB, esata was a little better, still drops around 20% though.

Transferring between drives within the enclosure gave the same 80MBps seq results, indicating it's the controller.