Usb 2 vs usb 3 speed test movie#
Usb 2 vs usb 3 speed test full#

The PCI Express interface card, required to enable USB 3 support, will sell for £40. In the meantime, Buffalo plans to release three versions of the product: a 1TB model for £110, a 1.5TB model for £160, and a 2TB model for £240 - all of which are due at the end of November.

Usb 2 vs usb 3 speed test full#

Still, it's definitely a step in the right direction and we expect these devices to get even faster over time, as USB chipsets reach full maturity and software is tweaked to optimise performance. On initial results, the Buffalo HD-HXU3 is around four times faster over USB 3 than it is over USB 2, which is significant, but it's nowhere near as quick as one might expect. We repeated the same test with the same disks in USB 2 mode and the test took a whopping 8 minutes 11 seconds.Īre we impressed by USB 3? Well, yes and no. The entire process took 2 minutes exactly.

Usb 2 vs usb 3 speed test movie#

mkv 1080p movie file from the Buffalo HD-HXU3 to a Hitachi Ultrastar 15K300 SATA drive with 16MB of RAM and a 15,000rpm spin speed. In real-world testing, things were a little more impressive. Atto recorded a peak read speed of 29Mbps and peak write of 25Mbps. The same benchmark, repeated in USB 2 mode, yielded far slower results. Here, we saw peak read rates of 119Mbps and peak write rates of 83Mbps in USB 3 mode.

With its accompanying PCI Express interface card connected to our test PC, we fired up the synthetic Atto Disk Benchmark appliation, which measures performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. In practice, USB 3 - or at least the Buffalo HD-HXU3 - isn't anywhere near its promised throughput, but it's still fast. USB 3, in contrast, tops out at 4.8Gbps - 10 times higher than USB 2, and 1.8Gbps quicker than a SATA hard drive. USB 2 tops out at a maximum throughput of 480Mbps, but in reality, the actual throughput depends on many external factors. Its major advantage over USB 2 is its improved speed. SuperSpeed USB 3, people! Pull up a chair and let's take a butchers'.īefore we rip the drive itself to shreds, sniffing at its innards to discover what manner of secrecy it hides, let's talk about the USB 3 standard in general. Today, Crave has the Buffalo HD-HXU3, the very first external hard drive in the UK that uses the SuperSpeed USB 3 standard. Then, a coalition of slightly brainier bods upped its game to bring us the miracle that was Hi-Speed USB 2. In the beginning, a coalition of the finest tech minds brought us the plug-and-play phenomenon that was USB.