Portable Performance: Four USB 3.0 Enclosures For Your 2.5” Drive
Table of contents
- 1. A Best-Case Scenario
- 2. Never The Twain Shall Meet
- 3. Bytecc HD6-SU3
- 4. Eagle Tech Consus ET-CS2FSU3-BK
USB 3.0 is set to become the de facto standard for performance-oriented portable devices. We take a look at four enclosures that bring modern performance to pocket-sized storage. If you have an old laptop drive laying around, throw it in one of these.
SuperSpeed USB (also known as USB 3.0) brings 5 Gb/s transfer rates to the world of portable devices. That level of performance even appears to compete with established storage standards like SATA, but it’s going to take a while for developers of USB hardware to catch up.
With proven performance and storage-specific features, such as native command queuing (NCQ), controller-based RAID support, and TRIM for SSD drives, eSATA is set to remain the standard for fixed external devices over the next few years. However, portable storage solutions usually don’t need those features, as hot plug and removal are often easier to manage without them, and the USB connector even provides enough amperage to power most pocket-sized devices, while larger storage alternatives and eSATA both require a separate power supply.
Today, most USB devices can’t even maximize the 60 MB/s limit of USB 2.0. But some of those devices don't need to go any faster than that. Portable mass storage is where we can reap the benefits of a faster interface, as it can take several minutes to transfer something as small as a movie file using USB 2.0. Notebook hard drives have already broken through the 100 MB/s barrier, and USB-2.0-to-SATA bridges have remained stuck at less than 40 MB/s. SSD drives are up to three times faster still, and even the left-over unit from your recent notebook upgrade is probably 50% to 100% faster than any USB 2.0 enclosure you can find for it.
Given that USB 2.0 is unsuitable for our high-capacity portable storage needs, we tracked down several pocket-sized USB 3.0 enclosures to put a few of our own 2.5” drives to better use, unfettered by the bottleneck imposed by last-generation's peripheral bus.
Latest External Storage News
Latest External Storage reviews
- 10/04 – In Pictures: External Data Storage Through The Ages
- 10/11 – Round-Up: 15 microSDHC Cards, Benchmarked And Reviewed
- 25/05 – Qnap TS-559 Pro+: Familiar Network Storage With A New CPU
- 24/05 – 10 SDXC/SDHC Memory Cards, Rounded Up And Benchmarked
- 18/05 – Is Data Encryption Worth Destroying Your NAS' Performance?
I'd also like to see the performance increase with a standard 2.5" HDD. There aren't many people going to install an SSD into one of these.
It's good to see USB3 improve on USB2. But 1.6Gb/s is some way from the 5Gb/s on the box.
Is there any hardware as of now that can ACTUALLY utilise the 5Gb/s supposed speeds?
no there isn't
That's b'coz when usb 2.0 was launched in 2000, there were simply no peripheral devices 2 support it. Even 2day, there'r hardly any devices which will fully exploit usb 2.0's 60 mB/s data rate.
Going by this trend, usb 3.0 should b mainstream in about 2-4 years...
Can we also have some latency and random read/write figures on this controller? If this has already been discussed, a link to that discussion would be a good idea.
Also, I agree with the other posters that it makes more sense to test a (fast) HDD instead of an SSD for this test. In that case things like power issues, noise issues and heat issues might pop up. An SSD won't suffer from neither.