Thought USB 3 Was Fast?

pumaz · 10 Mar 2011 at 14:05

Just bought a Sharkoon SATA QuickPort XT USB3.0 Plus and am in the process of copying my 500GB steam folder from an internal 7200rpm Sata drive to a 7200 drive in the Sharkoon and i've had speeds as low as 1.2mbs with the highest being 42.5mbs :confused:

I can get speeds of 112mbs over my network to an eSata drive attached to an Acer Revo.

Does this sound right?

pumaz · 10 Mar 2011 at 14:41

The Sharkoon SATA QuickPort XT USB3.0 Plus came with a USB3 controller card that gives me two ports and I've definitely used one of them.

Here's a link to the one I bought

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-010-SH

pumaz · 10 Mar 2011 at 15:42

Does this look right? Running on the USB3 Controller card btw.

Was kind of expecting eSata speeds but it's about half that

pumaz · 10 Mar 2011 at 18:00

Broken Hope - I honestly don't know what's going on. Those scores look fine and what i was expecting, but in actual use it's getting extremely slow. Just been copying My steam folder for the last couple of hours and all that's copied is just over 3GB

I bought this Sharkoon because I've never been able to fix the constant disconnecting I get from eSata (Google it's a common problem) Thought I would get a similar speed with USB3 but without the problems, but now I have a whole new set

pumaz · 10 Mar 2011 at 19:23

Dukes right it is the small files it's really slow on, I just copied a 7GB mkv and was getting 112mbs to a 5400rpm storage drive i have. But when it gets to those small files it really is incredibly slow. Like i said i it took two hours to copy 3GB of my steam folder, eSata never took nearly this long.

Btw when i'm doing this copying im not using my rig for anything else at all.

pumaz · 10 Mar 2011 at 21:33

Zipping up before copying would be just as slow maybe even slower and my hard drive isn't that fragged. It is puzzling why small files take longer to copy over using USB3 than eSata especialy when you consider USB3 shouldn't be slower than eSata.

I'm going to do a 1.5TB Drive backup overnight using EASEUS Partition Master Professional Edition and see how that goes.

pumaz · 10 Mar 2011 at 22:22

Guys, I have a 1.5TB hard drive just for games and my steam folder also resides on this. Steam folder alone is nearly 500GB. Now there is a ton of small files scattered throughout my drive, The only realistic way to zip/rar these up would be the whole steam folder and every individual game that isn't in the steam folder to.

Can you not see how doing this would take some time as well as space while compressing, and after that i would have to back them up and if i needed to copy them back i would have to extract them.

To me that seems a bit long winded when all i want to do is backup a drive. Why should it take longer to copy over small files on USB3 than eSata is the real crux of this and that's the answer I seek

pumaz · 13 Mar 2011 at 10:49

Ok guys, I've been trying to get the sharkoon working for days now with no joy. I've had some unbelievably slow speeds to my computer locking up on more than one occasion. I decided to take the USB3 card out and have a sata and power cable coming straight off motherboard and out the back of computer and I've successfully backed up a 1.5TB & 2TB drives at good speeds with no problems at all

It's not a neat solution but it works and that's what matters. I'll rma the sharkoon back. I think it could be down to the docks themselves as I've experience similar problems with an esata dock. Whatever the reason I'm not at all impressed with USB3.

pumaz · 15 Mar 2011 at 22:42

Too late for me to try mines on it's way back for a refund! I'm sticking with a Sata and power cable coming off the motherboard and out the back of my case, Works like a dream

I did plug in an old ide to usb2 adaptor today to backup a friends drive which consisted of a good mixture of small and large files. It copied across at a steady and constant 24mbs and felt allot faster than usb3 and with no problems either.