• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Low Performance: USB 3.0 SSD on Notebook

C

carbeque

n00b
Joined
Feb 28, 2011
Messages
4
Hey everyone-

I just purchased a Lenovo W510 for my mechanical design consulting business, and I love it!

I also purchased a Corsair F120 120GB SSD and a Patriot Gauntlet USB 3.0 enclosure for storage of files. In running initial tests on this drive with HD Tune Pro, I found the following:

1) Sequential read: Internal HDD (7200 RPM) starts off at ~97 MB/sec and tapers off to ~60% of that speed as the test runs out to the edge of the platter. SSD, on the other hand, is a constant ~94 MB/sec or so, and equals the performance of the HDD when the HDD is about at the 100GB mark (500GB drive).

2) Sequential write: Internal HDD is still just under 100 MB/sec to start, but the SSD only delivers about 50 MB/sec.

Now this is a newer Sandforce SSD capable of over 250 MB/sec transfer rates, so I know the bottleneck isn't the SSD. Also, I read test writeup here: http://www.guru3d.com/article/msi-star-usb-3-controller-test/9 where a USB 3.0 card installed in a desktop PC performed MUCH better with an external SSD connected, at almost twice the read speed and 3x the write speed that I experienced, using the same test software. Finally, let's assume the SSD is limited to the same throughput as the internal hard drive for some odd reason... why would the write speed to the SSD be cut in half? In any case, I would expect higher performance from a 250 MB/sec drive on a 5Gigabit interface connected to a PCI bus vs. an HDD capable of around 100 MB/sec on a 3 gigabit interface on the same PCI bus.

Any ideas on what might be going on here? Can I actually expect higher performance? At this point, I'd be happy to match the performance of the internal hard drive! I googled this topic, and can't find any tests of a USB 3.0 SSD on a laptop, which is really strange.

My USB 3.0 controller driver is version 1.0.19.0, which I believe is current.
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?sitestyle=lenovo&lndocid=MIGR-74435

I also tried this on a Dell M6500, and got the same result. Chances are they're using the same chipset. I'm not sure if this is due to an incompatibility between the enclosure and SSD, or the enclosure and the PC chipset, or ???

Thanks,

-Rodney
 
I found this test result, which is the Gauntlet enclosure with an OCZ SSD:
attooczusb3.jpg


Here's the article: http://www.testfreaks.com/blog/review/review-of-patriot-gauntlet-usb-3-0-2-5-hdd-enclosure-pcgt25s/

So it does run quickly with an SSD, but I don't know which chipset this one has. I know that my F120 is one of the fastest out there though, and wouldn't be the bottleneck.

-r
 
Update: I tried this drive in two other brands of USB 3.0 enclosures and got exactly the same result.

I tried it in an eSATA enclosure and got about 100 MB/sec read and ~80 MB/sec write. Better!

I connected the drive to a SATA II port in my desktop (G35 chipset, E8400 Core 2 Duo) and got about 150 MB/sec read and ~120 MB/sec write. I'm not impressed... I'm tempted to "borrow" a different SSD from Fry's and see if it performs differently!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top