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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