USB3.0 Chipset Thoroughput Performance Round Up Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2012-05-07
·
1,077 words · ~5 min read
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so today I have a test that's very interesting to
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me because I copy a lot of data around so
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what I have here is my little chart that I'm going to make and I'm going to be
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looking at the performance of various USB chipsets and various drive solutions
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so I have three different solutions that I'm going to be using the first of which
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you can see here is I'm going to do a oh
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did I write one terabyte oh boy it's
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been a long day already Guys these are all you know what let's just yeah these
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are all 1 Gigabyte file copies okay so the first solution is a USB 3 seate
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glex um adapter plugged into a patriot
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Wildfire drive so this is one of the highest performance drive it's pretty
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much the highest performance drive on the market so we're going to see what
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kind of thorough put we can get using that next we have a Seagate free agent
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glex this is a 5400 RPM storage shrive this is also hooked up to a usb3 chipset
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here at the back the one I have here is the native a75 chipset one I'm going to
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compare that against the as media one which uh based on that it's just started
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turning up and it's on an assus board I'm guessing it's their own kind of custom thing and it's probably going to
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turn up on other assus boards in the future so the performance may be
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relevant I'm also going to test against the ever
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popular Renaissance so this is on uh some of the higher end boards
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particularly they used to be NEC usb3 chipsets so you can see I've got one
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here on the z68a gd80 and finally I'm
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going to test against USB 2 so I'm going to test against Intel's USB 2 controller
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just because it's a much more known quantity than the one on this a75
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chipset the last Drive configuration I'm going to test is the mushkin Ventura Pro
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this is a USB 3 drive and I'm going to find out what the difference in
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performance is between a high performance USB thumb drive like this an
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Extreme Performance SSD on USB 3 and a
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regular hard drive on USB 3 across all these different platforms so I'll be
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back with results or with any abnormal findings throughout the testing here so
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the first round of testing on the ASUS a75 board is done so on the a75
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controller I accidentally wrote These in the wrong box I got 34.5 megab per
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second consistently and I'm just timing this on my iPhone while I do the
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transfer so I got 29 seconds 29 seconds and 29 seconds to transfer my 1 GB file
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so I'm going to go ahead and assume that's a chipset limitation on large
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file transfers on the as media controller however I got 125 mbes per
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second on the glex with the Wildfire SSD
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so let's assume that that's pretty much the limits of what we can achieve with
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the this usb3 controller and then next we have 67 megabytes per second on the
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one or on the mushkin Ventura Pro remember that's the USB 3 stick and
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finally 50 let's call it 53 megabytes per second on the drive with a hard
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drive as opposed to a solid state drive
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okay so what I'm going to do is I'm going to change motherboards here change platforms going to switch over to my
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Intel platform and we're going to test the usb2 for reference as well as the
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Renaissance controller which you can see down there somewhere
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it's right there all right well I'm done
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most of them so I'm just going to run my last test here and I'll talk a little
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bit about the results that I've seen so far while it's running so yeah it's not
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sophisticated but yes this is actually how I'm testing it I press stop when
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it's done transferring so here we go so I've tested the NEC Renaissance however
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you pronounce that I have no idea controller you can see that you okay a
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few things become fairly apparent right off the bat here number one is is that
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the Wildfire is not a bottleneck for any
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of these interfaces I mean we're we're not even seeing anywhere near the limit
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of what that thing is capable of doing next is that the Ventura Pro seems to
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max out around there we go it's done so that took oh surprise surprise 37 so
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that'll be around 27 megabytes per second okay so these
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are all in megabytes per second okay so the Ventura
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Pro is uh limited to 67 megab per second
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cuz you can see these two controllers are both capable of higher numbers up to
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125 or 111 megab per second with the
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glex interface on the Wildfire Drive
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okay uh down here you can see that with the mechanical drive we don't see any
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higher than these are both 53 mby pers second and we can also see that the a75
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usb3 controller is bottlenecking pretty much every solution here the USB 2
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controller performs consist consistently with all of them because once again it
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is the bottleneck not the drives themselves and the Renaissance one that
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appears to be the limit because we see that the golex Wildfire performs better
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on the as media controller so that Asia controller is actually looking pretty
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darn good my results are not scientific and they are not accurate to within 01
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of a megabyte per second these are all approximate number so take them with a
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grain of salt but there you have it the Renaissance controller is approxim Ely
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four times faster than USB 2 the as media controller is about another 10%
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faster than that and then the a75 controller seems to bring up the rear
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here as far as the usb3 controllers go so thank you for checking out my video
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