is there a performance Penalty to running an HDD over USB 3.0?

I have an HGST 7200 RPM 1 TB laptop drive that I have put in a USB 3.0 Enclosure and I am wondering if there are any performance penalties if I run the drive over USB 3.0 compared the 6 GBs SATA internal connection.

Since USB 3.0 has a max rate of 5 Gbit/s it should not a problem I guess. But there has to be more to it as it is was not designed for HDD like the SATA interface. And the interface ovearhead?

Since my encllouser supports UASP, it should not have any interface issues, will it?



Here's a Benchmark I ran for my 7200 1Tb drive over USB 3.0, running with UASP. Is this the same kind of performance I would get in an internal SATA connection?

What are the pros and cons of using an external UASP USB 3.0 encloser for an HDD?

Thanks.

 

Little to no penalty. HDD's are too slow to even make use of the SATA connection.

 

I have to agree here. I put a 2TB Seagate 7200RPM 3.5inch HDD in an external 3.0 enclosure earlier this year. Before the enclosure I would get ~125MB/s when large transfers, such as system backups, were happening.

After being put in the powered enclosure I get ~120MB/s when transferring the same files.

 

The Seq Q32 write speeds that I got seem extremely slow though, which got me worried. The read speeds seem fine though.

 

Hmm, not sure if those are low for a HDD or not. I didn't run in depth benchmarks before moving the drive from internal to external. Just the specific use cases it was going to be used for.

May I ask what you plan on using this drive for now that it is in an external enclosure? If speed is your main concern, you would most likely get absolutely tip top speeds with an internal SATA connection.

 

Unfortunately an internal connection is not an option as the internal SATA slot on my laptop is occupied by a 750Gb SSD. I am just curious to see how much Performance i am losing by using the USB 3 interface.

 

Ah, I see. Well, let me hook up a drive and see what CDM scores it gets via a native Z97 SATA connection using up to date SATA drivers.

EDIT = Looks like you do lose some read stats in the SeqQ32T1, 4kQ32T1 and 4k. Not sure if that will cause real issues or not, but since I only use this same drive in its external enclosure for 60+GB sequential files I will be fine.

http://imgur.com/PCLDMx4

 

When you open device manager and look under the IDE ATA/ATAPI section, do you have a "default" looking entry using a Microsoft driver or do you have an actual named device that is using an Intel driver? Mine is called Intel 9 series chipset and it is using the last driver released for my motherboard on ASUS' site. Version 14.5.0.1081 from 6/3/2015 and it works just fine for me so far.

 

Not much, just make sure you have the drive not set to quick removal in device manager.

With it on, drive caching is turned off.

 

Well, being connected through USB will drive support SATA commands/features? Like Native Command Queuing. Although NCQ itself shows little performance increase on desktop systems, but who knows which else features are implemented on SATA but not on USB...