Does The USB 3.0 Controller On Your Motherboard Matter?

[acku]

Given a lack of chipset vendors integrating USB 3.0 support into their core logic (with the exception of AMD's Socket FM1-focused A75), motherboard manufacturers are forced to lean hard on third-party solutions. We take a few for a test drive.

Does The USB 3.0 Controller On Your Motherboard Matter? : Read more

 

[nikorr]

Great article!

 

[amk-aka-Phantom]

Asus changed the USB 3.0 controller on their P8P67 line of boards... I think they switched to ASMedia from NEC, and I'd love to see the difference between the two benchmarked. I think this article has way too few controllers; there're more USB 3.0 solutions on the market.

Well, at least the article showed that it's possible to reach 150 MBps write speeds and higher... good enough for me. Now all I need is a USB 3.0 drive

 

[The Greater Good]

That's why eSATA is the best for external storage. USB is great for everything other than data throughput.

 

[de5_Roy]

thanks for the article! i always use usb drives, most of the old drives using usb converters. good to know i can run multiple of them without hitting speed limit.

 

[lockhrt999]

They should have included windows 8 in this benchmark. On my system win7 writes at 3-4 MB/s to thumb drive and win8 writes at constant 10 MB/s to same thumb drive. (Everything's USB 2.0 though). Some witchcraft I don't know but they should have included win 8.

 

[lp231]

[citation][nom]The Greater Good[/nom]That's why eSATA is the best for external storage. USB is great for everything other than data throughput.[/citation]

I've tried eSATA and found out it's not as user friendly as USB.
You will need a external power source if the eSATA isn't self powered.
Then you will also have to setup the right bios config or the eSATA won't
work properly like it's suppose to and basically the eSATA drive becomes a internal cause you lose the ability of hot plugging and swapping.

 

[lockhrt999]

[citation][nom]lp231[/nom]I've tried eSATA and found out it's not as user friendly as USB. You will need a external power source if the eSATA isn't self powered.Then you will also have to setup the right bios config or the eSATA won'twork properly like it's suppose to and basically the eSATA drive becomes a internal cause you lose the ability of hot plugging and swapping.[/citation]

What? Even internal drives can be hot plugged and swapped. OS recognizes both internal and external sata drives alike. Once you connect it just go into My computer > manage > devices and search for new drives. To unplug simply right click on that drive and click disable. Even this can be done with IDE (ATA) provided you don't use old P4 era motherboards.

 

[Crashman]

[citation][nom]lockhrt999[/nom]What? Even internal drives can be hot plugged and swapped. OS recognizes both internal and external sata drives alike. Once you connect it just go into My computer > manage > devices and search for new drives. To unplug simply right click on that drive and click disable. Even this can be done with IDE (ATA) provided you don't use old P4 era motherboards.[/citation]You started off right but then went soooo wrong.
1.) Motherboards with hot-plug capability to internal drives were available almost from the beginning. Nvidia was famous for adding this function to its drive controller firmware, and ASRock was famous for adding it to the drive controller firmware of boards with other chipsets.

2.) To this very day, the ports of many NEW motherboards STILL lack firmware support for this function on at least some of the ports. A few lack hot swap firmware on all of the ports, and a many have this feature selectable in BIOS.

So, even though you're part right, the person you responded to is more right.

 

[lockhrt999]

[citation][nom]Crashman[/nom]You started off right but then went soooo wrong.1.) Motherboards with hot-plug capability to internal drives were available almost from the beginning. Nvidia was famous for adding this function to its drive controller firmware, and ASRock was famous for adding it to the drive controller firmware of boards with other chipsets.2.) To this very day, the ports of many NEW motherboards STILL lack firmware support for this function on at least some of the ports. A few lack hot swap firmware on all of the ports, and a many have this feature selectable in BIOS.So, even though you're part right, the person you responded to is more right.[/citation]

Thanks for filling me. Coincidentally I never came across motherboard that doesn't support hot plugging out of the box that's why I thought everyone supports it.

 

[Guest]

I am a little surprised to see no mention made of USB 3 connections being dropped when plugging a (supposedly) USB 3-capable external dock or enclosure into a motherboard port connected to a Renesas/NEC USB 3 controller. Speculation faults, for instance, the JMicron USB 3 controller on the dock/enclosure; ASMedia is speculated to be less problematic. At any rate, "real world" experience finds dropped connection problems, which makes speed a secondary concern. Can this "dropped USB 3 connection" issue be addressed as well? Thanks.

 

[ZakTheEvil]

USB3 on my Gigabyte board was very unstable, hard drives would frequently disconnect. Disabling USB3 Power Management helped somehow, but they still often didn't appear after boot. I tried all available driver versions to no avail. I'm running Windows 7x64, by the way. Also, the enclosures I tried wouldn't spin the drives down after the host PC was shut down. I finally got two eSATA enclosures instead.

 

[ZakTheEvil]

[citation][nom]dbguy[/nom]I am a little surprised to see no mention made of USB 3 connections being dropped when plugging a (supposedly) USB 3-capable external dock or enclosure into a motherboard port connected to a Renesas/NEC USB 3 controller. Speculation faults, for instance, the JMicron USB 3 controller on the dock/enclosure; ASMedia is speculated to be less problematic. At any rate, "real world" experience finds dropped connection problems, which makes speed a secondary concern. Can this "dropped USB 3 connection" issue be addressed as well? Thanks.[/citation]

If SATA is set to AHCI it'll support hot-swapping if it's set to ATA/Legacy it will not.

 

[ZakTheEvil]

Oh crap, quoted the wrong post. This is such a crappy comments system: no edit capability

 

[Pyree]

That is good to hear. I have used two different usb 3.0 controller and I don't notice difference on performance on mechanical HDD. Now that I know the performance is similar for different controller, I am thinking of getting SATA 3 external SSD.

 

[livebriand]

Is there a difference on USB 3/SATA adapters/enclosures? I have a WD Caviar Green 3.5" that the WD Elements USB 2 enclosure is bottlenecking (yeah, I know the newer ones are USB 3), and I'm wondering if the $15 Rosewill enclosure I'm looking at is good enough. Anything must beat the 25MB/sec I get currently though.

 

[livebriand]

[citation][nom]zaktheevil[/nom]USB3 on my Gigabyte board was very unstable, hard drives would frequently disconnect. Disabling USB3 Power Management helped somehow, but they still often didn't appear after boot. I tried all available driver versions to no avail. I'm running Windows 7x64, by the way. Also, the enclosures I tried wouldn't spin the drives down after the host PC was shut down. I finally got two eSATA enclosures instead.[/citation]
USB 3 power management seems to cause issues. With it enabled, I got really slow speeds (using a USB 2 HDD though, just out of curiosity). With it disabled, I got the same speed as the USB 2 controller.

 

[snorves]

There is High Speed version of USB2.0 which allows transferring of data significantly faster than the standard version. In my previous PC, it was enabled only on a certain port.

 

[SteelCity1981]

I don't see a big jump in performance on my USB 3.0 vs my USB 2.0 in file transfer using a External USB 3.0 hard drive I go from 20mb on USB 2.0 to 60mb USB 3.0 on acg sometimes it will go up to 80mb but i notice if I'm transfering a bunch of diff files my USB 3.0 transfer speed drops to almost USB 2.0 speed.

 

[ArgleBargle]

I have four external WD 3 Tb drives on USB 3.0, achieved with a four port hub plus a controller which plugs into the PCI 1x slot (motherboard does not have USB 3.0 native). I'm lucky if I can get 50 Mb/s sustained transfer from the internal HD to an external. It's about 2.5X as good as USB 2.0 sustained, but not too fantastic. Running Win7 Ult64 with 12Gb RAM and an i7-950.

 

[ArgleBargle]

[citation][nom]lp231[/nom]...basically the eSATA drive becomes a internal cause you lose the ability of hot plugging and swapping.[/citation]
I have an external drive which has eSATA, USB 2.0 and Firewire. I'm using it on USB 2.0 for this very reason: hot plugging/swapping.

 

[Guest]

I miss FIREWIRE. It seems like the market has ignored this wonderful interface. Even Microsoft in Windows 7 has decided to not implement firewire networking, which was VERY useful when you wanted to do some quick file transfers between PCs. External drives are hopping onboard the USB bandwagon and firewire support is just hard to find.

 

[ramon zarat]

Nice article. 2 suggestions:

1- If you are to test saturation, test with devices capable of actually saturating your setup. Get yourself an external USB 3 case with SATA 3 interface and put inside your fastest SATA 3 SSD instead of using old SATA 2 external devices like you did.

2- External devices and the controllers are only 2 parts of the equation. The PCIe subsystem being the third. Some vendor such as Asrock use a PLX switch to mix USB 3, SATA 3 and Gigabit Ethernet over a single PCIe 2.0 lane. I would like to know how USB 3 devices perform while concurrently maxing out the SATA 3 and Ethernet ports. What's gonabe more affected under that scenario? The USB 3, the SATA 3 or the Gigabit connection? All of them equally? Or is the PLX switch able to do some voodoo and keep all devices running at near peak performance?

Thanks,

Ramon

 

[jn77]

I want an 80 port USB 3 HUB that has enough controllers to run all 80 ports at full speed

 

[David 617]

lp231 :

...basically the eSATA drive becomes a internal cause you lose the ability of hot plugging and swapping.


I have an external drive which has eSATA, USB 2.0 and Firewire. I'm using it on USB 2.0 for this very reason: hot plugging/swapping.

What are you talking about? Of course its hot-swappable. Ref 1 Ref 2