On Mon, Oct 24, 2011 at 1:28 PM, walt <w41...@gmail.com> wrote: > I just bought an add-on USB3 adapter and outboard USB3/sata docking > station, and I've been comparing the performance with my old e-sata > outboard docking station. Not so good :( > > After getting some unreliable results with hdparm, I settled on > copying one 3GB file from one partition of the outboard drive to > another partition of the same drive. These results are highly > reproducible, and favor e-sata over USB3 by a large margin. > > Over at least six trials on each docking station I consistently > get 105 seconds for USB and 84 seconds for e-sata, a 5:4 ratio > in favor of e-sata. > > I used the same hard disk and the same pci-e slot in the same > minimally-loaded machine for all the runs, and got very consistent > results every time. > > Basically, the USB3/sata docking station gets the same throughput as > the older sata 1 drives connected to the onboard pci sata controller, > which is still pretty respectable for an outboard drive, I think. > > So, has anyone out there done similar tests on USB3 drives yet?
I have not; I don't have a system with USB3 yet. As far as USB3 goes, I'm more curious about host-host networking performance. Anyone played with that? If it's reasonably reliable, I could see 3-4 USB3 ports on three machines acting as a poor-man's high-performance, one-hop many-many mesh network, potentially good for network-synchronized block devices. I find Intel's Thunderbolt interesting for similar reasons. -- :wq
