UASP hard drives?

[dgingeri]

Are there any USB 3 hard drives out there (preassembled, like from WD or Seagate or something similar) that support UASP?

I could go out an buy an enclosure and a SATA hard drive, but I haven't had very good luck with reliability on those in the past. I have 3 different Vantec enclosures that I have used with several different hard drives, and several other brands of USB 2 enclosures, but they have all had issues of various types. This "it works until you write to it for 20 minutes and then disconnects" or "it works until you let it sit for an hour and then you have to power cycle it" BS is really annoying. I'd rather buy a preassembled unit that has been tested to actually work at least somewhat close to 100%.

I'm currently using a 4TB Seagate that works quite well, but it is a bit slow. My storage drive backup (978GB of data on a 2TB drive) takes about 4 hours on this drive. I've heard UASP, supported by my USB 3 controller, can possibly make this far faster. Does anyone know of a drive that would support UASP?

 

[Alabalcho]

I doubt UASP (which is just a protocol) will have any effect on your performance. The limiting factor now has moved from slow interconnect (USB 2.0) to slow media (your hard drive). How long would it take if that drive was connected directly to your SATA interface instead of over USB?

 

[dgingeri]

I can do a regular copy to another SATA drive in about half an hour. The storage drive is a Seagate 2TB 7200rpm drive, and has a transfer rate of about 160MB/s for the first third of the drive, then ramps down to about 80MB/s at the end. The Seagate 4TB USB 3 drive shows a transfer rate of a bit lower than that through HDTach, but the transfers to the drive are much slower. (I use Acronis True Image Platnum for the daily backups, scheduled at 10AM every day. This backup is only for the data storage, not the OS or any active programs.)

I also use a Vantec USB 3 enclosure with a Seagate 2TB drive for my main drive/ game drive daily image backup, but I have to remember to power cycle it every morning before I head out to work because the stupid thing disconnects after about 12 hours. I also have to remember to turn the stupid thing off while booting or it delays my boot by a good 5 minutes until the BIOS times out checking it. I hate this Vantec enclosure with a passion. (The system backup, not including the storage drive, is scheduled for 8:30AM every weekday, and images all 4 "other" drives on my system: OS, games, WoW, and VMs. It only takes about 40 minutes to image all these drives, but the USB 3 enclosure quits responding after about 12 hours until it is power cycled.)

I just mentioned the USB 2 enclosures because my past experiences with them were negative. I've also tried 3 different eSATA enclosures with very, very bad luck. Only one eSATA enclosure worked for more than a few minutes, the other two were only useful for USB 2 and simply would not work at all through eSATA. I'm not using USB 2 for any storage at this time, and have never used eSATA successfully.

I prefer to keep my backups to external drives rather than internal because of a situation with my nephew's PC that scared me. I got a call from him one day that his computer wasn't working. I brought it to my place to test it out, only to find that every single part in the machine had been fried. It turned out that the power supply fan had failed, and the power supply had gotten hot enough to melt some of the solder. The solder for the 5V and 12V rails merged, and sent 12V through the 5V rail, frying everything in the box. All the PCI slots were dead, the hard drive, the floppy drive, the optical drive, everything. All of his data was lost. I went out and got external USB enclosures for my backup drives the next day, and have kept my backup drives externally ever since. I also stopped using cheap power supplies.

 

[popatim]

I went thru a similar experience years ago. I went to hotswap bays for a while and kept rotating harddrives thru it and then finally build a home server.. You lose some speed unless you go thru the added expense of channel bonding Nics & router But I can live with a constant & reliable 100-120MB/s transfer rates

edir - and BTW, the server was only another $200 expense. $70 motherbd, $50 processor, $30 ram (4gb), $50 Windows Home Server 2011. I already had drives and plenty of used cases laying about.

Now I don't know why I didn't build one sooner. Sometimes I'm just too big a tightwad....

 

[dgingeri]

yeah, I've had storage servers off and on for several years, but lately I've been using those servers for my cert training. I haven't been able to keep a fully operational server for about 6 months because I keep reformatting them for reinstall to try out a feature or role.