I just got a 4tb external hard drive. Works great but it has a usb 3.0 connection.
I can use it with my usb 2.0 fine but it’s slow. My other external drive has an eSATA connection, but this new 4tb drive does not.
I only use the drive for back up, so speed isn’t that big a deal, but it’d be nice.
I was looking to put a USB 3.0 connection into my computer. My motherboard does not have the connector, but I do have an empty PCI Express slot.
I have seen USB 3.0 for PCI Express, but some of the comments on the site are saying that you don’t get any better speeds using USB 3.0 if you’re connecting with a PCI Express slot instead of the mother board.
I also have a 4TB Hitachi external for storage: I put in a pci-e four slot card to use usb 3.0; Opensuse incorporated it immediately ( as well it should since Linux had usb 3.0 capabilities before the others ).
I would say using 3.0 for transfer is about 4 times faster last time I checked; it makes no difference in playing or using a file.
Sometimes it craps out and the drive won’t mount for a while: this is more down to Hitachi connections than anything else, although the motherboard’s maker Asus may not be blameless: in that case I reconnect with a usb 2.0 cable.
Delightfully, the KDE gurus have just decided with the latest Opensuse to mount external media in both* /run/media/[name]/Hitachi4TB* and* /var/run/media/[name]/Hitachi4TB* instead of the confusing and difficult* /media/Hitachi4TB.*
I bought a Western Digital MyBook 1.5TB ext drive a while back. It too was USB 3.0 capable but my PC only had 2.0 built-in. I used it like that for a year or so then finally decided to get a USB 3.0 card and see if that would help. It installed and functioned fine, so I wanted to measure its performance. I tried various freeware disk utilities but none seemed to do what I wanted. Finally I read on a BB to just try moving a huge file (2GB or larger) and check Windows’ displayed transfer speed. Although it will change as the transfer progresses (it’ll start out fast then slow down) USB 3.0 is definitely faster. A rough example: USB 2.0 would never start out any faster than 20-30MB/sec whereas 3.0 would start at 400MB/sec!
Remember though that doesn’t mean that everything will speed up (obviously CPU performance will be unchanged). However I run a weekly back up of my OS onto the ext drive and with USB 2 it took 45 mins to an hour, now it only take 30 mins.
PCI-E isn’t a single spec. There are modern versions of PCI-E that are backward compatible with older versions, and so the user doesn’t notice the change or mismatch.
PCI-E speeds per lane, for each version
Therefore you want a multi-lane V4.0 card put into a v4 pci-e slot, capable of the same or better lanes.. The 4X pcie v4 USB3 card may work in a slot that is of an older PCI-E version Or of lesser lanes, but only at the speed of that version times the number of lanes !.. Note that many motherboards have slots that accept a card the size of a 16 lane card, but the slot is limitted to less lanes. ..
So its quite easy to end up with a poor performing USB 3.0 card.. Because its in an older slot or because it is not running with enough PCI-E lanes.
It’s the usb 2.0 vs. 3.0 mismatch, but with pci-e cards.
As you’ve seen, data only moves as fast as the slowest device in the chain from external device to ‘on the motherboard’ (aka the south bus), whether it’s the usb port, the expansion card, the pci-e port itself, or something in-between.
This depends upon how many PCI Express 2.0 lanes the motherboard dedicates to each USB 3 hub and how many PCIe channels the card uses.
USB 3.0 has a bandwidth of 4.8 Gigabits per second each way (full duplex); a 1x PCIe 2.0 slot has a bandwidth of 500 Megabytes per second or 4 Gigabits, again, full duplex. That’s close enough for a straight 1:1 mapping on most motherboards. So you’ll get no loss from using an add-in card.
(IOW Isilder has not spotted that one is in bits per second and the other in bytes per second)
I did a quick scan of the PCI-e to USB3 adapters on newegg here and they all seem to be of the PCI-e x1 configuration as you can tell from this photograph here. The legend for the pic is here under form factors and it is the shortest slot.
Unless your motherboard is very old pre 2008 say, it is probably the PCI-e 2 specification. The gen 4 specification won’t be finalized until next year at the earliest most likely.
The max throughput for USB2 is 480mega bits per sec (Mbps) for USB3 it’s 5 Gbps or giga bits per second. This is close to the throughput for SATA III drives which is 6 Gbps and still better than for SATA 2 which is 3 Gbps.
So if you have an m/b with a gen 2 PCI-e bus, you should be able to get a PCI-e to USB3 adapter and it should provide decent speed improvement. Just remember that not all adapters are made with equal quality, so be sure to check the reviews.
Another unfortunate note…several makers have taken to using proprietary adapters. I have seen several units we tried to pop open to test and found that they had circuit boards that just had the usb plugged straight into them and no standard SATA sockets.
One thing to consider is that past a certain point, the slowest link in the chain will actually be the hard drive. For your typical USB external hard drive, the max read speed of the drive will actually be considerably slower than the USB 3.0 spec. This is because modern hard drives work fundamentally the same way that your old RCA record player did. Spinning platter with data encoded on it, reading head mounted on an arm that swings out to read the data.
Hard drives spin much faster, and use magnets instead of needles, but you still have to spin the disk and get the arm in place to read the data. Solid State Drives have no moving parts, and thus are much faster (they use flash memory, like a thumb drive does).
Don’t get me wrong, a USB 3.0 hard drive on a USB 3.0 connection is still much faster than the same drive on a USB 2.0 connection, but that’s something you might run into.
