Hard Drive Docking Stations - 2 Single Bay or 1 Two Bay

[dmcmillen]

I need to add 2 more SATA III HDDs to my system so I am in the market for hard drive docking station or stations that support UASP. I am looking at the Thermaltake or the Startech units. The Thermatake BlacX 2 bay unit (ST0022u) does not support UASP while all the Startechs do support UASP. I understand that UASP must be supported on both the device and host side.

The single bay Thermaltake BlacX Duet 5G (ST0019u) does support UASP.

I'm curious as to the difference in performance in using 2 single bay units each connected to a separate 3.0 port on the host versus 1 two bay unit connected to one 3.0 host port? I am assuming that the multi-bay units have a 3.0 hub. If I use the Thermaltakes, I would have to use 2 single units if I want UASP. I have no problem using 2 single units since space is not an issue and I have plenty of host 3.0 ports. Just wondering about the performance issues. Would assume that the single units would be faster than the multi-units when accessing both drives simultaneously???

Thanks --David

 

[drtweak]

Few things

1) How much data will you be trasfering to the drives? will it be all the time or just for storage?

2) is your USB 3.0 UAS Compatible? If not it won't matter if the dock is UAS Compatible

3) What version of windows? If it is Windows 7, OSX 10.7, Or older version of Linux it will NOT support UAS and again defeats the purpose.

So with those answers you can then find out if two single docks or one dual dock is better.

 

[dmcmillen]

Drives to be used for backups and storage. Transfers will be large when using so want maximum performance. Host is UAS compatible. I am 64-bit Win 7 Home Premium. Are there no Win 7 USB drivers that support UAS? For example, I thought ASUS provided Win 7 drivers for their USB 3.0 Boost??

 

[drtweak]

Turbo mode and UASP are two different things. Turbo mode is just a speed boost. UASP Is a Protocal that is new to USB 3.0.

You can read more up on it here.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/usb-3-uas-turbo,3215.html

Also you gotta think USB 3.0 is up to 5 Gbps or roughly 600 megabytes per second. Unless you are using SSD you won't be able to max that out even if you are writing to two Hard Drives at the same time (But that is going by numbers not by experience)

 

[dmcmillen]

Thanks drtweak. Been out of town for a few days.

I think I'll repost the question since everyone is missing the original question. I shouldn't have muddied the water with the UASP issue. I understand that UASP is a usb 3.0 protocol and that some mb manufacturers have speed boosts that are not UASP. ASUS calls their UASP "USB 3.0 Boost"

My question was primarily comparing the performance of
(A) one dual-bay sata iii hdd docking station connected via a single 3.0 cable to the host versus
(B) two single-bay sata iii hdd docking stations each connected via two 3.0 cables to the host

If I'm using both hdd's at the same time both heavily i/o bound, which would provide the better performance given the same 3.0 device chip set in the single-bay and the dual-bay and using identical drives. I am assuming the dual bay has a 3.0 hub. I would expect the two single-bay units to provide better performance.

 

[drtweak]

The way i see it. Hard drives can do what? 80 MBps on a good hard drive? USB 3.0 is 640 MBps