USB 3.0 Speeds

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Hi,

I recently got a Sony Mach 16GB USB 3.0 memory stick

I was trying to see the speed difference so I got a folder with all my two years college work in (757mb) and copied it to the empty USB stick in a USB 2.0 port and it took 4 minutes

I then put it in the USB 3.0 port, deleted the folder so it was an empty USB stick again and got 3m15s

Does that sound about right? I was expecting it to be a lot quicker than that, or am I expecting too much?
 
The Z68 board uses a 3rd party controller, so that seems about fine. If it was controlled by a chipset with a native USB 3.0 controller you may see higher speeds, but then it also depends on the USB drive's rated speeds as well.
 
I don't even use the usb 3 ports on my board

Why not?

The Z68 board uses a 3rd party controller, so that seems about fine. If it was controlled by a chipset with a native USB 3.0 controller you may see higher speeds, but then it also depends on the USB drive's rated speeds as well.

Okay that makes sense then. Like the Marvel SATA ports on some boards?

I thought I might as well get a USB 3.0 stick though now if I'm buying one, no point buying old technology lol
 
Yup pretty much. Honestly though, I gave up with USB 3.0 on my board. They kept dropping the device so I disabled the Etron controller... Don't have any USB 3.0 devices but am low on USB ports :p.
 
Etron are horrible, bad bad bad. NEC and Asmedia for 3rd party. Have seen major boosts with portable HDDs and SSDs, as much as 150mb + with SSDs and 70-80mb/sec with hdds, big boost.
 
Yup pretty much. Honestly though, I gave up with USB 3.0 on my board. They kept dropping the device so I disabled the Etron controller... Don't have any USB 3.0 devices but am low on USB ports :p.

Hmmmm, I will carry on using it, even if it is only a small boost, might as well as long as it doesn't drop out like yours did

Etron are horrible, bad bad bad. NEC and Asmedia for 3rd party. Have seen major boosts with portable HDDs and SSDs, as much as 150mb + with SSDs and 70-80mb/sec with hdds, big boost.

How do I find out what make mine is?
 
Your motherboard controller will be fine, the problem is most USB 3.0 flash drives have slow memory in them so the write speeds aren't any better.

You'd need a drive like:

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=FL-076-KS&groupid=701&catid=1913&subcat=2042

or

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=FL-001-OE&groupid=701&catid=1913&subcat=2042

to see a real difference.

Unless I am reading it wrong, my memory stick has better read speed than the Kingston there and not far off read speed on the other stick

The sony website doesn't mention write speed though

This is for my exact stick:

Up to 120MB/s read spead

Yes, Sony have spelt 'speed' wrong :p haha
 
Unless I am reading it wrong, my memory stick has better read speed than the Kingston there and not far off read speed on the other stick

The sony website doesn't mention write speed though

This is for my exact stick:



Yes, Sony have spelt 'speed' wrong :p haha

OcUK aren't showing the correct specs for the Kingston drive.

Here's how mine benches, run AS SSD yourself but only have the top box checked.

HPnXR.png
 
Most usb sticks are for cheap small memory transport, not performance, not least because they are easy to lose or have stolen so a £40 16gb usb stick will barely sell but a £10 32gb stick will sell by the bucket loads.

USB 3 is very useful, though mostly because USB 2.0 sucks, esata was always brilliant long before usb 3 was available, I think its still much better for random performance, but a massive step over usb 2.

Fact is with nand flash you can get just about any read speed you want, write speed is harder to deal with but read speed is purely raid 0 across as many chips as you want, nothing more complicated than that but cost increases as you've got more chips, more traces and you need a more complex(expensive) controller to deal with all the channels.

Even a basic 2.5" external drive usb 2 will limit you to sub 30mb/s, usb 3 will get 80-90mb's on a cheap hard drive. Stick an ssd or a decent memory stick and usb 3 will fly, the cost of memory sticks really isn't worth it for anything but size. You can get a 128gb ssd, stick it in an external box and get ridiculous speeds.

99% of usb sticks are cheap, single/dual channel controller, and cheap slow memory meaning you'll get 5mb/s read/writes on any interface.

Personally I'd prefer to spend The £80 on a 128gb ssd, a £5 enclosure, either esata or usb 3 and blow away a super fast memory stick on price/GB, performance, everything.
 
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