usb 3

[humandrums]

hi guys! hope you all had a great christmas!
i recently purchased a roll your own external usb drive enclosure for a spare sata drive i had lying around, its a usb 3 one this wasnt intentional it just seemed the best value of all of them at the time, if i get a usb 3 pcix expansion card off amazon there a fiver at the moment am i going to notice a big performance increase on that drive?? im going to use it purely for backing up audio projects etc on?

thx in advance

jon

[Richie Royale]

USB 3 has a higher bandwith, so you will notice some increase in data transfer speed.

USB 2.0 rate of 480 Mbit/s (~57 MB/s)
USB 3.0 rate of 5.0 Gbit/s (~596 MB/s)

but the hard drive will not be able to take full advantage of the USB3 rate I think.

wiki says - As of 2010, a typical 7200 rpm desktop hard drive has a sustained "disk-to-buffer" data transfer rate up to 1030 Mbits/sec

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive#Data_transfer_rate

[Pete Kaine]

Yeah, that sounds about right as far as data transfer speeds go (roughly 130MB/s for a good drive) as mechanical drives only have a finite read speed due to the nature of the design. If you want to make use of USB 3's transfer speeds you need to some sort of flash based storage to really see the improvements.