USB3 vs SATA

[Angelo Mike]

Is there some reason you have for asking if they wouldn’t be reliable or safe? I use both without any problems.

[John Rofrano]

I have both and I did some tests with my 9TB RAID 5 array.

Connected via USB 3.0:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 3.0.2 x64 (C) 2007-2013 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : https://crystalmark.info/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s]

Sequential Read : 90.076 MB/s
Sequential Write : 164.122 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 34.975 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 17.128 MB/s
Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 0.390 MB/s [ 95.2 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 0.161 MB/s [ 39.3 IOPS]
Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 0.448 MB/s [ 109.4 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 0.150 MB/s [ 36.6 IOPS]

Test : 1000 MB [R: 14.1% (1181.9/8383.3 GB)] (x5) USB 3.0
Date : 2013/07/14 11:01:04
OS : Windows 7 Home Premium Edition SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64)
Connected via eSATA:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 3.0.2 x64 (C) 2007-2013 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : https://crystalmark.info/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s]

Sequential Read : 111.432 MB/s
Sequential Write : 201.359 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 38.397 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 17.106 MB/s
Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 0.387 MB/s [ 94.5 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 0.164 MB/s [ 40.0 IOPS]
Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 0.458 MB/s [ 111.7 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 0.151 MB/s [ 36.9 IOPS]

Test : 1000 MB [R: 14.1% (1181.9/8383.3 GB)] (x5) eSATA
Date : 2013/07/14 13:15:12
OS : Windows 7 Home Premium Edition SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64)
So you can see that eSATA is giving me 111.432 MB/s Read and 201.359 MB/s Writes while USB 3.0 is only giving me 90.076 MB/s Read and 164.122 MB/s Write. Not a huge difference but eSATA is still a little quicker so I still use it but nothing wrong with using USB 3.0.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Al Bergstein]

Thanks for the great benchmarking on this John. I think my perspective, and yes, I use both currently, is that the difference seems small in the real world. And the USB 3.0 connectors are less prone to falling out, which I have to tell you, I think was the cause of my last RAID failure on eSata. So i’m willing to forego the small speed increase for an increase in reliability.

Also, when moving between my Mac and W7 machines, the USB 3.0 is now the one common standard I can rely on. Same with Windows machines as my Lenovo high end laptop had a very flakey eSata port, but the USB 3.0 was no problem. (I sold that machine a while back). All my new OWC RAIDS have 3.0 and eSata on them, and I can at least read from the Mac drives on my W7 machine, as well as plug them into my laptop, and both desktops. having just restored a 4 TB RAID array I can tell you that was useful! My W7 machine could not at times read the files off the RAID while my Mac Pro and MB Laptop had no problems. Something is better in file read ability on OS X over W7 64 that I don’t understand. It saved a few files that I might have otherwise lost/needed to find on one of my ancient backups. There you have it.

Al

[Enrique Orozco]

thanks for all your comments…

great forum …

Enrique Orozco R.
iDEA DigitalVideoStudio

[John Rofrano]

You’re welcome… glad we could help.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com