Three External (And Fast) USB 3.0 Drives Compared

Features
By Patrick Schmid and Achim Roos
published

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: Access Time And I/O Performance

Access times are very close to what we’re familiar with on bare drives. It appears that the USB 3.0 interface doesn’t introduce much latency.

The I/O performance results show what could happen if many concurrent users or programs access your USB 3.0 drive.

Patrick Schmid and Achim Roos