Three External (And Fast) USB 3.0 Drives Compared

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The first USB 3.0-based external hard drives aim at eliminating the USB 2.0 bottleneck (that hovered around 30 MB/s) with enough bandwidth to outperform the fastest mechanical disks. A-Data, Buffalo, and WD do battle for maximum performance.

Benchmark Results: Throughput

As expected, the fastest drive in this roundup is WD’s MyBook 3.0, not because of superior design or implementation, but due to the use of a 3.5” drive. The A-Data and Buffalo solutions are based on 2.5” drives, which are slower on throughput.

Write performance is comparable to the read results.

Interface performance shows the peak bandwidth that the USB 3.0 implementations could reach if only the drives were fast enough. Clearly, SSDs on USB 3.0 would make sense for enthusiasts.

Patrick Schmid and Achim Roos