25 replies to this topic 1 votes

[Sharpstick68]

I recently purchased 2x2 TB WD Caviar Green seeing as how best buy was having a sale and amazon also reduced the price, which will most likely go back and forth but I bought them because they are only 119 each. Anyway I plan to use these drives for storage only, now I currently have the same types of drives in a HDD Dock that is USB 3.0, and my motherboard natively supports Sata 6 on all the 5 ports available. My question is what would I be better off doing, putting the 2 drives I have in my dock now inside my computer, putting the new drives I'm getting in the dock, or installing them in my computer?. What is faster in terms of interface is what I'm trying to say...Sata 6 or USB 3.0.

[Ulpian]

SATAIII has 6GBs and USB 3.0 has 5GBs. Also I think that USB has more protocol overhead.
I think that SATA3 is more reliable. Much more.

[TEX4S]

Either way you will get the same results. crap speeds

The connection isnt your bottleneck - its those hard drives.

But to answer your question, the SATA 6Gb connection is currently showing better speeds. I think it has to do with USB3.0 driver maturity.
Both have the ability to get really fast, but right now SATAIII has the edge.

[Sharpstick68]

What's wrong with the hard drives? the interface on it supports sata 3 and 6 so I don't understand.

[Miuku.]

Nothing, you're simply faced with the reality that rotational hard drives are limited by their inherently slow design.

Think of it an an autobahn. The speed limit is 350 but your Toyota can only do 200.

[Sharpstick68]

Uhm, okay?

[Deranged]

They're right. Hard drives don't hit the max interface speeds.

Native SATA should use less CPU resources though so that's how I'd go.

[Miuku.]

I concur with the above poster - USB always adds unnecessary overhead (especially when copying huge files)

[Mark]

One drive supports USB 3 and the other SATA3. Both of these interfaces support a maximum throughput, but that doesn't mean these drives ever meet that speed.

The only type of hard drives that in fact come even close are SSD's, they work in an entirely different way. I have a couple of fairly fast platter based hard drives and the fastest I've seen out of them via SATA3 is 120MB/s (for large read/writes from a 2nd drive of the same type) which is nothing close to the actual throughput for sata 3, it's actually 0.9375 gigabits.

These drives are connected to SATA 3 but they only have SATA 2 controllers and they don't even hit the max speed for sata 2. My SSD smokes them, it's super fast but even that only has a SATA 2 controller!

So there you have it, don't worry about the interface type at all, look for actual benchmarks for these drives to see how they stack against each other.

[Sharpstick68]

What does that mean when you say USB always adds unnecessary overhead (especially when copying huge files)

[smooth_criminal1990]

SATA-based interfaces also support OS-level Native Command Queueing (NCQ), which decides which orders read/write operations to minimize seeking, in theory making it faster.

[Mark]

BTW, if you're interested in speed, I'd still put my money on sata but you should consider, how many other people have a dockable computer and will you want to transport the data on this drive to share with others at any point? In that case, USB is the obvious choice.

[Deranged]

Sharpstick68, on 09 April 2012 - 09:27, said:

What does that mean when you say USB always adds unnecessary overhead (especially when copying huge files)

USB is a host controlled protocol. Very little is typically offloaded at the chipset level. With SATA the chipset controls most of it and the CPU deals with the data as little as possible.

You probably won't usually notice unless you're doing a lot of things at once, with todays CPUs.

[Mando]

youll not see any performance above SATA2 speeds in all honesty with either solution. Physical hard disks are limited by rotational speeds of the platters/mechanical limits. The only way to see perf speeds near SATAIII or USB3 is with SSDs.

the only difference on those drives to previous generations is the interface, nothing has changed internally (or minor things like larger cache) pointless tbvh.

[+devHead]

Sharpstick68, on 09 April 2012 - 08:47, said:

What's wrong with the hard drives? the interface on it supports sata 3 and 6 so I don't understand.

Green hard drives spin at 5400 RPM. So, it doesn't matter whether you have SATA6 connection or USB3, the drive itself is not going to be as fast. There's nothing 'wrong' with the drives per se, but they are slower, and designed primarily for storage, not for speed.