Most hardware manufacturers are finally rolling out USB 3.0 devices. We’ve seen motherboards, hubs, hard drives, and notebooks all rocking the new and improved USB standard. It’s clearly the future of USB with backwards compatibility, dramatically faster speeds and full-duplex data transfers. That’s great, but it’s still not faster than eSATA right now.
Testing parameters: These numbers were gathered using HD Tune Pro 4.01. I also timed an 8.34 GB file transfer onto the drive for real world results. The two external drives were 7200 RPM models, while the internal was a 5400 RPM drive. I would have liked to show the Western Digital MyBook 3.0′s results as well, but the drive and HD Tune Pro didn’t get along. Check out the review for a comparison between the Seagate PS110 — it’s just slightly faster.
Of course USB 3.0 brings a host of other improvements over the 2.0 spec and eSATA. It’s dramatically more power efficient, allowing more power-hungry bus-powered devices and better power management when devices are idle. USB 3.0 also can theoretically hit 600 MB/s. But right now it’s not the ultimate external data transfer protocol. That title belongs to eSATA.
This will likely change over the next few years as computer hardware catches up to USB 3.0. The situation is nothing new. Most up and coming technology is limited by current hardware. USB 2.0 went through the same thing years ago. But if you’re looking for a reliable and fast external hard drive right now, forget USB 3.0 and instead look at eSATA drives.
USB 3.0 is still the way to go for the future.
The HDD’s used in this test are all different. Some are 7200′s some are 5400′s and even the 7200′s are different too.
This test can not be a fair comparison to as long as it does not compare the very same hdd with different types of IO’s.
I now have both a WD MY book 1TB eSata (3GB) and just got my Seagate Black Armor PS 110 500GB USB 3.0 kit. Both drives are 7200 rpm.
Tests have been rather scattered. eSata read avg is 75-80 MBS while USB3.0 is 90-94mbs. So USB 3.0 seems better on reads. When it comes to writes the eSata is better at 74mbs with USB3.0 at 60-65.
Here’s the other odd thing. Running the Win7 OS x64 there is an option in the drive properties policy to use Quick removel(Default) or better performance (write caching). When switching to better performance I see a lower rate with the tests on USB3.0. This is the opposite of how I expected it would be. Read rate drop to 60 – 65 mbs and writes to 50 mbs. Very dissapointing. I was expecting better overall performance with the USB3.0.
New/better driver in the works? I sure hope so.
I don’t understand why eSATA is so much slower than internal SATA in these tests. SATA and eSATA are the same, as far as I know, besides the location of the drive. I can plug my eSATA connectors to standard SATA jacks on my mobo, and it will work the same without my system knowing the difference.
The way I see it, the only difference would be the drive … So why use a slower drive for eSATA?!
I can use an external eSATA dock and drop any standard SATA drive in it, and it will perform the same as any internal drive, because the motherboard has no idea where that drive is located and doesn’t care.
Sooo, why the slowdown in these measurements? Please explain.
I misread your charts. I feel really stupid. Sorry.
So the question becomes … Why is eSATA faster than internal SATA? Unless I’m still being an idiot here…
@gabe.
internal drives are 5400 rpm, while externals are 7200. explains the difference, as i have it.
Thanks for conducting the test with the equipment you have available.
Just a thought: your USB 3.0 adapter is an ExpressCard. A quick glance at wikipedia (fwiw) indicates that the maximum bus bandwidth for ExpressCard is 2.5 Gbps. It would be quite interesting to see what kind of performance a USB 3.0 adapter would provide if it were on an appropriately-designed multilane PCIe adapter. I imagine USB 3.0 would perform better if it were on equal southbridge footing, as it were.