New-Gen Interface: Are They Worth It?

Ever since the computer came into being, the quest for

speed has kept on multiplying. The latest speed bearing technology is the USB

3.0 and SATA 6 Gbps interface. The standout factor for the duo, apart from other

offerings like power efficiency, is that they claim to be able to provide

unprecedented data transfer rates. We tested the two interfaces for transfer

rates against their older counterparts.

Hardware support for these new interfaces is steadily

picking up. Gigabyte, Asus and Seagate are touted to be early adopters to

incorporate these interfaces in their line of products. Here, we test USB 3.0

and SATA 6Gbps interfaces with the help of Gigabyte P55A-UD6 motherboard and

Asus PCIe x4 expansion card with USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gbps capabilities.

The test bed included the Intel Core i5 661 (3.33 GHz)

Processor, 2Gb (1800MHz) Patriot DDR3 RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT graphic card,

Windows 7 Ultimate and a standard spindle-based Seagate 120 GB HDD for native

operating systems. USB 3.0 was connected through the IDE to USB 3.0 converter

with the Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB HDD.

USB 2.0 vs USB 3.0



href="http://pcquest.ciol.com/content/techtrends/2010/110020109.asp">USB 3.0 Super Speed is said to be able to achieve a theoretical transfer

speed of 4.8 Gbps (600MBps) which is 10 times faster than the 480Mbps of USB2.0. The same was put to the test. We connected the Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB to

our setup via the PCIE Gen II from Asus.Refer to the screenshots below, USB

3.0 href="http://pcquest.ciol.com/content/topstories/2009/109120506.asp">interface did help to garner an average transfer speed of up to 115 MB/sec

whereas the same setup achieved a transfer speed of a mere 34 MB/sec when

plugged into the USB 2.0 interface. Thus it can be said that the speed thrust

provided by the 'Superspeed' USB 3.0 is indeed noteworthy as compared to that of

USB 2.0. It should be noted that the protocol overheads in case of the USB

connections are much more as compared to their SATA counterparts. Technology

upgradations and newer offerings from other vendors would indeed help to

somewhat up the practical possible transfer speed.

HDTune File benchmark results for USB 2.0 (left) and USB 3.0 (right) clearly indicate a massive step up in transfer speeds with the USB 3.0 interface.

Here the performance increase is around 4 times which is a

pretty decent jump. So for those who are looking for high speed data transfer

for portable drives, this could be something to look out for. But again, the

number of products available today is limited and is coming at a high premium.

More on USB 3.0 is available at

http://tinyurl.com/ydppclo

SATA 3Gbps vs SATA 6Gbps



The case for SATA 6Gbps is not so strong. Although Seagate have produced the

world's first drive with SATA 6Gbps interface, Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB is not

able to deliver level of performance expected from it. This is because it uses

magnetic storage and is only able to use the extra bandwidth when reading from

cache. The SATA 6Gbps interface is expected to be utilized by the SSDs with

bandwidth capabilities of over 500 MB.

Refer to the screenshots below, the difference between the

SATA 3 Gbps and the new SATA 6 Gbps interface is not much in terms of the

average transfer rates achieved. Both being very close to the 110 Mb/sec mark,

some difference in the burst speed was observed. The same drive did deliver a

burst speed of about 102 MB/sec when connected to the SATA 3Gbps interface,

whereas it managed 178 MB/sec when connected to the SATA 6 Gbps connector.

Today, the number of devices are very few which support SATA 6 Gbps and the ones

which support are also not able to harness the speed completely. So the right

decision will be to wait and see the products mature first before you actually

lay your hands upon them.

HDTune File benchmark results for SATA 3 Gbps (left) and SATA 6 Gbps (right) don't indicate too much of a difference in transfer speeds of the two connecting interfaces.

Conclusion



Vendors are upgrading their hardware to be able to support these new

interface connectors so as to deliver the speed boosts expected from the latest

interfaces. But it will take some time to come up to the potential levels of

speed that these interfaces promise. Also, the high cost of the products

supporting these new interfaces is also expected to come down with time which

will make their adoption much easier and widespread.

Though the speed achieved at the moment is nothing close to

their true potential, it is important to note that the steps are being taken in

the right direction. The results, however, do indicate that we can look forward

to faster data transfers.

Faster data transfer rates also ensure that these

interfaces might also be incorporated in domains like high-resolution webcams,

external Blu-Ray drives, large LCD monitors, digital cameras, etc. Medical

equipment designed to give accurate and up to date data logs and images could be

using these too.

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