Is USB 3 suitable for all external hdd?

[sergio dezorzi]

Hello, I would like to know if USB 3 can be effective with all external drives or ony with with drives specially made for USB 3.
I have several external drives, from six months to eight years old.
Thanks.
Serg

 

[Pyree]

Usb 3.0 is the new specification on the usb connection which gives you more bandwidth for faster data transfer. To enable usb 3.0 speed your port and device must both be usb 3.0. If your external enclosure are all usb 2.0, they will work on 3.0 port but at the 2.0 speed as usb 3.0 is backward compatible to usb 2.0 and 1.0.

In short, if you don't have usb 3.0 enclosure, you can still use them on 3.0 port, but without the fast bandwidth. Please note that mechanical HDD will be the bottleneck due to the speed limit of the spinning HDD platter and platter density, unless the HDDs are in raid. You will also not see the advertised 4.8 gigabit per second or 600 megabyte per second speed because there is protocol overhead.

 

[sminlal]

To add to Pyree's post:

All consumer drives use IDE or SATA, not USB. To use USB with a drive, you have to install it into an enclosure. You can install any SATA drive into a USB 3.0 enclosure, so the answer to your is: if it's a SATA drive then you can use it with USB 3.0 if you buy an enclosure (such as this one) for it.

If your drive can manage a transfer rate above about 40MByte/sec (which is true for almost all 3.5" SATA drives) then you'll see better speeds from USB 3.0 than you would from USB 2.0.