Thought USB 3 Was Fast?

Phil2008 · 12 Mar 2011 at 21:34

thunderflash said:
Ah wait a minute, erm just tried moving 1 film (1.5gb) from my main storage drive to the usb 3 external drive and got 120mbps for 1st 3 quarters then down to 30mbps for the last quarter. Then moving the same file back from usb 3 drive to internal storage I get 31mbps. So the benchmarks don't really work as such?

The copying/moving always starts stupidly high then it gradually drops to its normal speed. A microsoft thing

Phil2008 · 12 Mar 2011 at 21:46

Just get a cheap usb3.0 pci card, and it should be fixed :mad:

thunderflash · 13 Mar 2011 at 07:27

Phil2008 said:
Just get a cheap usb3.0 pci card, and it should be fixed

Would one of these work in my pc it says it's for certain models of Asus boards Asus U3S6 USB3.0 & SATA 6Gbps PCI-Express Controller Card [U3S6]. Also by fitting this to a pci slot it won't reduce my graphics card power would it? As in reduce it from 16x to 8x or something?

marc1024 · 13 Mar 2011 at 10:41

before minecraft changed, it had a lot of small files, transfering them from one HD to another took ******* ages, took around 20-30minutes for a 25mb map but i transfered a small video at 130mb and it took 3 minutes. I suspect that could be the problem.

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.

thunderflash · 13 Mar 2011 at 11:06

Am sending mine back too not that much quicker if any than my SATA II external drive.

HangTime · 14 Mar 2011 at 22:50

pumaz said:
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

My guess is USB has higher latency / more overhead.
Latency won't matter if the total number of files you are copying is low, e.g. 50 10GB files would only hit that overhead 50 times. However 50,000 10MB files would hit that overhead 50,000 times. It's probably not as simple as that but that's the general idea.

What I'd find interesting would be a comparison with USB2.

thunderflash · 15 Mar 2011 at 13:00

just noticed this bios update would this make any difference?

1.9 -1.10

- Update CSM Amilegacy16.bin file for fix System cannot enter Win7 32bit after installing Comback recover software(SATA3.0 PORT).
- Add USB3.0 support in legacy mode.
- Fix Multi BIOS watch dog fail in DXE issue.
- Fixed coding error.
- Fix usb mouse(steelseries 62001/Wintek.WM700)Movement Issue and usb mouse (ROCCAT.Kova) can not be detected well in UEFI bios

Phil2008 · 15 Mar 2011 at 13:09

Its worth a go.

thunderflash · 15 Mar 2011 at 13:10

ok here goes, bios flash number 5

if I'm not back in an hour put my dinner in the dog please

DragonQ · 15 Mar 2011 at 13:35

Phil2008 said:
The copying/moving always starts stupidly high then it gradually drops to its normal speed. A microsoft thing

No, it's an HDD cache thing.

Also, multiple smaller files always takes longer than fewer larger files. This is particularly true of USB flash drives (so zipping is very useful) but it's also true for traditional HDDs.

thunderflash · 15 Mar 2011 at 13:45

Well did the bios update, usb 3 still the same speed. Moved a single avi file of 950mb and it was an average of 31 seconds read and write. Worth a try I suppose.

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.

thunderflash · 16 Mar 2011 at 17:57

pumaz said:
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.

Sent mine back today too, ordered another 2tb drive instead, 6tb should do me for a while

silversurfer · 24 Mar 2011 at 13:17

Also, multiple smaller files always takes longer than fewer larger files. This is particularly true of USB flash drives

I thought flash memory was low latency and especially good for smaller files hence readyboost and all that and some normal drives adding special cache memory I think I read about also as well as the obvious ssd

DragonQ · 24 Mar 2011 at 13:30

Flash memory sucks for smaller files. I never understood why ReadyBoost would be an improvement over a normal page file for that very reason.

silversurfer · 24 Mar 2011 at 13:59

I think its because a mechanical disks seek time but ok thanks. I just got a flash drive with quad channel whatever that is, I will see what a benchmark says, crystalmark maybe?

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