USB 3 External Storage Roundup


By Barry ~ February 9th, 2011. Filed under: Enclosures, Reviews.

Products: Vantec NexStar 3 SuperSpeed, Vantec UGT-PC302 USB 3.0 PCI-e card, & Thermaltake Blac X 5G HDD Docking Station
Suppliers: Vantec & Thermaltake
MSRP:

It’s amazing the types of connectors and ports we used to put up with – serial, parallel, PS/2, AT.  Things with dozens of tiny pins that would inevitably break the minute you ran the connector over with your chair.  Thankfully, we’ve got slicker interfaces these days.

These days, it’s all about speed.  Whereas we once marveled at how fast our Zip and Jaz drives were, they now seem like archaic contraptions in comparison to today’s USB2 and Firewire devices.  That’s just the way today’s devices will look in comparison to the next (in theory) baseline standard for peripherals: USB3.0.

To the end user, there’s nothing particularly fancy about USB 3.0 – it looks the same from a plug standpoint, minus a slightly elongated device-end.  What’s under the hood is far more promising – a theoretical 5 Gbit/s (4800 Mbit/s) transfer speed, faster than current SATA 2.0 transfers and breezing past USB 2.0’s now paltry-sounding 480 Mbit/s speed.

Certainly by now you’d have expected to have USB devices built into your motherboard, right?  After all, USB 3.0 specs were released in late 2008, over 2 years ago.  Unfortunately, due to a number of factors concerning vendor adoption, not to mention the possibility of Intel’s Light Peak interface sometime next year, there hasn’t been as much of a rush to market.

Still, as of this writing, there are USB 3.0 devices aplenty out in the market, including motherboards (typically higher end), network cards, and of course, hard disk enclosures.  Today we take a look at 2 of the latter.

Vantec NST-380S3 External Hard Disk Enclosure


At first glance, the Vantec HDD enclosure looks like many others – stylish but simple.  There’s not a lot to be said – you install your choice of  3.5” SATA hard disk in and go.  The case felt sturdy enough, and installation was a snap (2 screws, plug in, go).  My only physical concern was the light – it’s probably the brightest thing I’ve seen since the HDD light on my old Shuttle mini-PC.  If you plan on sleeping in the same room, you’ll probably have to turn it off, tape it over, or just disconnect the transfer cable.  Luckily, I happen to be a fan of beautiful blue blinking bulbs, so it wasn’t an issue.

One odd thing about this enclosure – it’s USB 3.0, yet the SATA controller on it only supports SATA II.  This seems odd, given that SATA II is 3.0 Gbit/s and USB 3.0 is 5 Gbit/s (you’d want to support the ever-increasing SATA III 6 Gbit/s drivers, right?), but in the end it probably won’t matter for most people.  Why?  Because there’s not a mechanical drive on the market that’s going to get that close.  Certainly someone could place a Solid State Drive (SSD) inside it, but given the current 2010 pricing and the conceptual role of this device as a backup, it’s again an unlikely situation.

Thermaltake Blac X 5G HDD Docking Station


At first I admittedly thought the idea of an HDD docking station was silly.  I like my HDD’s carefully packed inside cases and enclosures, and I don’t like to hear them.  Why would I want to swap disks with the handy ejector button?

I’ll admit – this device grew on me.  Not only does it support a wide variety of 3.5” and 2.5” drives, it also supports SATA III 6Gbit/s, which is handy if you’re cloning drives or copying data to multiple drives in a row (the most convenient usage of this device).

Physically, the 5G looks like what you’d expect – like a high tech 8 track player.  Pop in a drive, power it on, and you’re done.  Push the button to eject.  The kit also includes a few rubber holders for drives, which isn’t a bad idea for those who want to swap often.

USB Card

For those of us not fortunate to have a motherboard with built-in USB 3.0, there’s a solution – a tiny PCI-e 1x card that contains 2 USB 3.0 ports.  It’s even more unobtrusive than the other two devices as you barely notice it’s there (and in fact, I nearly confused it with my 2-port USB 2.0 back panel a couple times). For those of you with older power supplies, look out – the card does require a SATA power supply to be connected (both HDD devices were externally powered, so I’d imagine this is for other devices one might connect).

Performance

For performance testing of the external devices, a WD1501FASS 1.5 TB SATA II drive was used and matched up against two reference devices:  a WD Passport 500 external USB 2.0 drive and an internal Crucial C300 128 GB SSD drive (for both ends of the spectrum).  Note that due to motherboard limitations, the Crucial was limited to Sata II 3.0 Gbit/s, though it is capable of Sata III.  HDD Tune Pro 4.60 was used for these benchmarks.

Test System:

Intel Core 2 Duo 2.13 Ghz

4 GB Ram

Asus P5B Motherboard

 

 

Conclusion

While the speed difference may not seem as dramatic as one might think, in practical terms it makes a world of difference.  Given a real-world mix of files, performance was nearly 4-5x that of USB 2.0.  Think about that – your 2 hour backup is now taking 30 minutes or less, your file copy, likewise.  Given that many of these tests were likely exceeding the mechanical speed of the drive itself, users of SSD drives will likely see even greater benefit.

At around $100 for both an enclosure and the card, these devices are a great option for someone considering a new backup, file transfer, or disk cloning solution.



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