Would old 2.5" HDD (5400 rpm, SATA 150) benefit from a USB 3.0 enclosure?

[clearlythat]

Hello,
Can someone please answer whether my old 2.5" HDD (5400 rpm, SATA 150) would benefit from a USB 3.0 enclosure? Should I just get a USB 2.0 enclosure b/c there wouldn't be any real-life benefit in terms of throughput and speed?

Thanks!

 

[leandrodafontoura]

There will be no diference

 

[clearlythat]

There will be no diference

Can you please let me in on ur thinking?

 

[COLGeek]

The old SATA 150 HDD is relatively slow, thus it makes no difference whether you use a USB 2.0 or USB 3.0 port/device. The issue is the relative performance of the HDD and not the USB port.

 

[jamie_1318]

Any hard drive should easily be able to saturate USB 2 ports (sustained rate of about 20MB/s) but how much more depends on the hard drive. unless you are relying on the fastest possible transfer rates it is probably not worth the money of getting a case with higher transfer rates like eSATA or USB3.

 

[cadder]

Properly functioning USB 2.0 is really not all that slow. (I've seen lots of computers that seemingly don't reach full USB 2.0 capability, but others that do.) However I would still think that a fairly recent hard drive could transfer significantly faster than USB 2.0 can. Whether it really works that way in a new enclosure, you might have to try it to see.

 

[fzabkar]

There was a recent discussion in this forum where it was demonstrated that USB 3.0 enables a HDD to achieve a data transfer rate within 10% of its SATA potential.

Therefore, I would either benchmark your drive, or search the Internet for HD Tune benchmarks.

http://www.hdtune.com/testresults.html
http://www.hdtune.com/results/Seagate_ST9160821AS.gif

 

[Pyree]

I have an old (2007-2008?) sata2 2.5 320GB Scorpio blue 5400rpm on usb 3.0 dock and transfer at about 40-60MBps depends on how full the drive is. Not sure if that gives you enough information on making an estimation of how fast your HDD will run.

I recommend you to search the internet, find out the bench mark for your HDD or take it out and put into a computer to run a benchmark to see how much faster the drive transfer compare with usb 2.0 of about 30MBps and to see if it is worth to get usb 3.0 or not.

But if you have usb 3.0 port, you are very likely to use them for your future storage expansion, so your usb 3.0 enclosure will be reused with a bigger drive and nothing goes to waste.

Buy it now or buy it later, don't make much of a difference.