usb 3.1 and 5400 RPM hard drive ?

[medosman2007]

I have Seagate Samsung Spinpoint M9T ST2000LM003 2TB 5400 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 2.5" Internal Notebook Hard Drive, and I want to buy a usb 3 gen 1 rack (10 Gb/s).
Is that will be useless since the hard drive's RPM is 5400? and Is it better to get usb 3 rack only ?
Thanks

 

[Scottray]

Save your money. A hard drive's transfer rate is more than 10 times slower than usb 3 gen 1.

 

[captaincharisma]

a 5400RPM HDD would still not be able to take advantage of the USB 3.0 rates. if you can find a USB 2 enclosure for a cheaper price then go for that option

 

[Dugimodo]

I disagree with the captain, USB 2 will bottleneck any hard drive to about 40-44MBps. A modern mechanical hard drives sequential transfer speed should be somewhere in the 80-200 MBps range, Slower than any USB 3 version but still much quicker than USB 2.

Ask yourself this as well, will you ever want to put a faster drive in that rack? I put a surplus SSD into a spare 2.5" USB 3.0 enclosure replacing the 5400 rpm drive that was in there and it's great. Wouldn't have been worth doing in a USB 2.0 enclosure.

 

[BFG-9000]

5400rpm drives can be made with higher areal density than 7200rpm drives so have always been able to compete with them in sequential transfer rates with large files. It's the seek time that's worse from the 33% increase in rotational latency which really hurts performance with many small files.

Modern 5400rpm drives can move over 200MB/s at the outer tracks and I've never seen over 36MB/s sustained out of USB 2.0

 

[captaincharisma]

I disagree with the captain, USB 2 will bottleneck any hard drive to about 40-44MBps. A modern mechanical hard drives sequential transfer speed should be somewhere in the 80-200 MBps range, Slower than any USB 3 version but still much quicker than USB 2.

Ask yourself this as well, will you ever want to put a faster drive in that rack? I put a surplus SSD into a spare 2.5" USB 3.0 enclosure replacing the 5400 rpm drive that was in there and it's great. Wouldn't have been worth doing in a USB 2.0 enclosure.

i was really only suggesting this if they were trying to get a USB enclosure, if the OP has a way to install it internally then that is the best option for sure

 

[mdd1963]

USB 3.0 port/transfer speed is preferred, but, 60 MB/sec (480 Mbps) speeds of USB 2.0 are usually not noticeably slower....unless transferring over multiple DVD-length files....

 

[Dugimodo]

Look at BFG-9000s graphs, that is absolutely a noticeable difference in practical use. No need for DVD sized files either, a system backup or just copying over your music collection etc will benefit greatly.

Also when I mentioned 40-44MB/s and BFG mentioned 36MB/s these are real world observed figures (and I was being generous). The speeds you mentioned are the theoretical maximum speeds of the interface and never happen in reality. Things like controller speed & protocol overheads etc limit the actual throughput.

With USB 3 there's enough unused speed that the overheads don't matter and you can get the full speed of the drive as if it was connected internally.