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USB 3.0 the Real Deal, SATA 6GB Not Yet
MojoKid writes "HotHardware has posted a sneak peek at a new motherboard Asus has coming down the pipe with USB 3.0 and SATA 6G support. The Asus P7P55D-E Premium has a PLX PCI Express Gen 2 switch implementation that connects to NEC USB 3.0 and Marvell SATA 6G controller chips. With a USB 3.0 enabled external hard drive connected to a USB 2.0 port and then to the board's USB 3.0 port, there were some rather impressive gains to observe. When connected to a USB 3.0 port, the external hard drive was about 5 — 6x faster versus connecting over USB 2.0, with total throughput in excess of 130MB/sec. On the other hand, benchmarks with Seagate's new Barracuda XT SATA 6G drive show little performance difference but a burst rate that is off the charts. According to ATTO, there are slight overall performance benefits to be had connecting the drive to the SATA 6G controller, but the deltas were quite small; somewhere in the neighborhood of 5MB/s or so."
Speed, price and ubiquity. HTH. HAND.
The Barracuda XT is a spinning platter HDD and so should not be expected to benefit significantly from the new SATA revision. SSDs on the other hand have already maxed out the transfer rate SATA 3Gbps. I suspect they would have seen the difference if they used a top of the line SSD.
This is good news all around, it's great to see things getting faster.
From what I can see in the graphs the USB3 HDD is indeed faster than on USB2 because of the bandwith; the SATA HDD is about the same on SATA 2 and 3, but also pretty near USB3. The title is implying superiority of USB over SATA when clearly the HDD is the limiting factor.
It's relatively straightforward to add more parallel channels to an SSD drive and increase bandwidth. In the long run, there isn't even much of a cost difference to make the same capacity SSD drive fast enough to max out SATA 6. (the main cost driver of SSDs appears to be the cost of the flash chips themselves)
So bring on the new drives that can max out SATA 6! Right now, you can get comparable performance if you put two or four high end SSDs into a RAID 0 array. However, there's a lot of problems with doing this : you have to fuss with software drivers, certain SSD features aren't supported very well (like Trim), and there are bottlenecks in motherboard RAID chipsets because spinning disks were never this quick. Dedicated hardware RAID cards cost $300-$1000, making the cost rather steep for most users. Finally, while SSDs probably are inherently more reliable in the long run than hard disks, it's not a good idea to build a system that depends on 2-4 separate drives, a motherboard chipset, and potentially buggy drivers or else your data is hosed.
So I'm very much looking forward to upcoming SSDs like the Vertex 2 that should be able to max out a SATA 6 link. That is, once the SATA 6 motherboards become relatively common.
> So "SATA 6GB" is working fine, but this disk is just too slow to take advantage of its speed increase.
You are forgetting that lots of people are switching to SSD disks with amazing throughputs.. so there is an actual benefit for SATA 6GB. I for one welcome the new SATA 6GB overlord.
Firewire 1600 / 3200 is better as it uses the same cables and ports as firewire 800. USB 3.0 needs new cables and ports also how high is the cpu load?
I like FireWire, but I think at this point it's dead. I have a couple of external FireWire 800 disks, but every other peripheral that I own is now USB. With USB 3, FireWire 800 is now much slower, so if I buy another disk it will be USB 3, not FireWire 800. The next laptop that I buy will have several USB 3 ports and I will be able to plug anything into them, from mice up to disk arrays. FireWire 3200 has been promised for years, but still isn't shipping, while USB 3 and eSATA both are. eSATA is a better choice if you just want disks, USB 3 is a better choice if you want flexibility (there are a lot more USB devices than FireWire devices, and FireWire 400, 800, and 3200 all have different connectors).
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