USB 3 enclosure under performing?

[Lord_Karango17]

So my bios post times go through if I have more than 1 hard drive connected via sata, so to reduce the problem I got a usb 3 enclosure for my secondary samsung 840, thinking that the usb 3 port wuld not hinder performance much with a theoretical throughput of 5Gb/s.

 

After getting it and connecting it to a usb 3 port, I fired up attor only to find peak read speeds around the 200 MB/s rather than what the ssd is capable of which is around 500 MB/s

 

The image with good read and write speeds is my main 850 evo bot drive.

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I remember that USB 2 was only capable of sustaining about 30 MBytes/s despite being a 480 Mbit/s interface (meaning it theoretically should have managed 60 MByte/s).  If that same architecture has not changed significantly, this may be why.  I'd love to know if anyone has ever seen 400+ MByte/s speeds through USB 3 (and I mean sustained, not just for 1 update of the file transfer window)

[Lord_Karango17]

2 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

I remember that USB 2 was only capable of sustaining about 30 MBytes/s despite being a 480 Mbit/s interface (meaning it theoretically should have managed 60 MByte/s).  If that same architecture has not changed significantly, this may be why.  I'd love to know if anyone has ever seen 400+ MByte/s speeds through USB 3 (and I mean sustained, not just for 1 update of the file transfer window)

Yeah, I just moved the drive to a usb port at the front of my case and speeds were slightly better, nearing 300 MB/s, but still not great...

 

I do have my external 1tb hdd in a usb 3 enclosure as well, so I will try putting the ssd in there to see if the results are better

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3 minutes ago, Lord_Karango17 said:

Yeah, I just moved the drive to a usb port at the front of my case and speeds were slightly better, nearing 300 MB/s, but still not great...

 

I do have my external 1tb hdd in a usb 3 enclosure as well, so I will try putting the ssd in there to see if the results are better

This topic has been something of a curiosity of mine for some time now - I would really like to see LTT test USB 3 in a variety of ways, and see if cases like yours (where speed is limited) is the result of a bad enclosure or just the limitations of the interface.

 

EDIT: Oh, one thing I should mention; try changing the size range from 0.5 - 8192 to something larger like 65536 to 65536+.

Edited March 21, 2016 by Ryan_Vickers

[Lord_Karango17]

Just now, huilun02 said:

Is it a UASP enclosure?

Maybe a link the the Amazon/Newegg page

Not sure what UASP is but here is the link for it:

 

https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B00IWOZAAQ/ref=pe_386430_186874910_TE_dp_1

[Lord_Karango17]

Ok so I think the enclosure is the fault, because I got near perfect speeds with the other enclosure I used with my hdd

 

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3 minutes ago, huilun02 said:

Is it a UASP enclosure?

Maybe a link the the Amazon/Newegg page

According to the link OP provided it does support UASP

[Lord_Karango17]

3 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

According to the link OP provided it does support UASP

Ok, so I just had a look through the comments for the enclosure (probably should have done this before purchasing it), and according to this person most of the controllers in external enclosures generally peak at 200 MB/s to 300 MB/s, but that does not explain the one I used with my HDD getting pretty respectable speeds (not the 500 MB/s the ssd got when wired up through sata, but pretty close)

 

http://prntscr.com/ai6pqw

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1 hour ago, Lord_Karango17 said:

Ok, so I just had a look through the comments for the enclosure (probably should have done this before purchasing it), and according to this person most of the controllers in external enclosures generally peak at 200 MB/s to 300 MB/s, but that does not explain the one I used with my HDD getting pretty respectable speeds (not the 500 MB/s the ssd got when wired up through sata, but pretty close)

 

http://prntscr.com/ai6pqw

 

1 hour ago, huilun02 said:

It probably doesn't support UASP. Its not written anywhere in the description.

Just cause its USB3 doesn't meant it supports UASP

 

I have a Samsung T1 and you should look up what people are getting with it.

That's real UASP speed

 

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25 minutes ago, huilun02 said:

That guy was wrong. He made an assumption

It seems like the company itself replying...

[Captain_WD]

14 hours ago, Lord_Karango17 said:

~snip~

Hey there,

USB3.0 connection has a limit ot 5Gb/s which is about 625MB/s. However, the real world speeds of the USB3.0 (after the encoding overhead) hardly reach more than 300MB/s-350MB/s. These speeds also depend on the type, quality and the length of the USB cable as well as the controllers of your enclosure and the motherboard itself. 200MB/s-250MB/s is what you would usually see when using an external SSD drive. 

I would suggest looking for an enclosure that uses ether eSATA or Thunderbolt as connections as you should see better speeds there.

Captain_WD.

[Lord_Karango17]

11 hours ago, huilun02 said:

Well I think OP knows the truth now. Albeit the hard way.

haha Yeah... Thankfully the other enclosure my hdd was in was able to reach fairly respectable speeds, otherwise I would be a bit hosed...

[Lord_Karango17]

6 hours ago, Captain_WD said:

Hey there,

USB3.0 connection has a limit ot 5Gb/s which is about 625MB/s. However, the real world speeds of the USB3.0 (after the encoding overhead) hardly reach more than 300MB/s-350MB/s. These speeds also depend on the type, quality and the length of the USB cable as well as the controllers of your enclosure and the motherboard itself. 200MB/s-250MB/s is what you would usually see when using an external SSD drive. 

I would suggest looking for an enclosure that uses ether eSATA or Thunderbolt as connections as you should see better speeds there.

Captain_WD.

I would he definitely looked elsewhere If my laptop had any of those connectors, but half the reason for me getting the enclosure is so that I have a way to hook up my drives to my laptop when I go back to Norway for the summer. While the 400MB/s read I got on the enclosure for reads was not amazing, I think it will be good enough for the thing I use it for (mainly games)

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49 minutes ago, Lord_Karango17 said:

I would he definitely looked elsewhere If my laptop had any of those connectors, but half the reason for me getting the enclosure is so that I have a way to hook up my drives to my laptop when I go back to Norway for the summer. While the 400MB/s read I got on the enclosure for reads was not amazing, I think it will be good enough for the thing I use it for (mainly games)

I just did some reading up on the new kinds of USB and apparently USB 3.1 gen 2 had overhead around 3%, which is a lot better than USB 2's apparent 50% overhead.  Maybe in the future USB will be good enough and we won't have to resort to "specialty connectors" like thunderbolt or esata

[Captain_WD]

16 hours ago, Lord_Karango17 said:

~snip~

Well, gaming doesn't really rely on the storage's performance for anything else but the loading times so you would hardly notice any performance differences between a SSD and a HDD in that enclosure (besides faster loading) so you should be good for that.
Do have in mind that some games require to be installed on an internal drive and can't really be put on that SSD.

Captain_WD.

[Lord_Karango17]

12 hours ago, Captain_WD said:

Well, gaming doesn't really rely on the storage's performance for anything else but the loading times so you would hardly notice any performance differences between a SSD and a HDD in that enclosure (besides faster loading) so you should be good for that.
Do have in mind that some games require to be installed on an internal drive and can't really be put on that SSD.

Captain_WD.

Yeah, after so many windows reinstall its hard to forget the games that act up when not "properly installed", and just run off the external drive.

[Captain_WD]

10 hours ago, Lord_Karango17 said:

~snip~

If you happen to have any problems with any of them do check the publisher's website as there might be some info on that or simply check some reviews.

 

If you happen to encounter any problems - feel free to post back!

 

Captain_WD.