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: Copy And Combined Read/Write Testing

The following tests are based on copy batch scripts using Microsoft’s Robocopy tool.

The MyBook 3.0 delivers much better performance thanks to its higher throughput.

However, the fastest drive overall isn’t necessarily fastest if only small files need to be copied. If you need to handle thousands of log files or similar data, the 2.5” drives will effectively be as fast as the more powerful 3.5” drive by WD.

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Simultaneous writes and reads are also quickest on the 3.5” WD MyBook 3.0.