USB 3.0 performance explored - Color it Blue

Color it blue

So we have received two cards from MSI. One purely for USB 3.0, the other one has USB 3.0 and SATA 6G as well. Since we still need to receive a SATA 6G compatible storage device (SSD), we'll focus on USB 3.0 solely for this article.

The Star-USB3 (USB 3.0) expansion cards from MSI will be driven by a NEC USB 3.0 controller chip and delivers a new standard SuperSpeed USB 3.0 performance up to 5Gbps data-transfer rate. That my fellow guru's is 10 times faster than traditional USB 2.0. Along with more bandwidth USB 3.0 now will carry at least 900mA current output for each port to easily access real fast external devices. The USB 3.0 ports support SuperSpeed at 5Gbit/s (640MB/s) then Hi-Speed (480Mbps), Full-Speed (12Mbps) and Low-Speed (1.5Mbps) data traffic.

USB cables, what you need to know is that USB 3.0 cables will be physically different inside. In other words, a USB 2.0 cable cannot carry data at USB 3.0 speeds, end of story.

To utilize USB 3.0, you'll need a USB 3.0 receptor port, a USB 3.0 cable and a USB 3.0 product; if you swap any of those pieces with USB 2.0, everything slows to USB 2.0 rates.

What about USB 2.0 compatibility you ask? Well, USB 3.0 expansion card are flexible and will have backward compatibility to USB 2.0 and even earlier devices. But do not think that when you plugin a USB 2.0 device (HDD storage for example) that you all of a sudden get USB 3.0 speeds. Both the cable, client and host device need to be SuperSpeed USB compatible.

As stated, MSI is launching a second card as well. a USB 3.0 and SATA 6G expansion card which provides a great flexibility with its backward compatibility to USB 2.0 and earlier devices and thus also supports high-speed SATA3 devices. The new 3.0 (SATA 6 Gbit/s) standard can support a maximum of roughly 715MB/s without the encoding overhead. While even the fastest conventional hard disk drives can barely saturate the original SATA 1.5 Gbit/s bandwidth, Solid State Disk drives have already are reaching SATA 2 Gbit/s limitations, especially when setup in RAID. And it is exactly there where SATA 6G is going to matter this year.

See, ten channels of fast NAND flash can reach over 500 MB/s with new and upcoming SSD drives, so a move from SATA 3 Gbit/s to SATA 6 Gbit/s would benefit the flash read speeds. As for the standard hard disks, the reads from their built-in DRAM cache will end up faster across the new interface.

But let's head onward to a photo-shoot where we can show you the two cards MSI supplied in more detail.

Behind bars right now - USB 3.0 - to be on familiar terms with by the color blue.