IO Level Up

[Harrison]

I'm not sure what the "button" would be for this. However I will say that it is currently a useless feature unless you were using SSD (Solidstate HDDs). This is because no HDD can transfer data at even USB2 or SATAII speeds, let alone USB3 and SATAIII speeds. About the best you will get out of any HDD at the moment is about 150Mbps. The only drives that can currently exceed these speeds are the very expensive SSD soldstate drives just on the market, but you would find it hard to notice the difference via SATAIII even with then. Equally I doubt you would notice much difference between a USB flash drive at USB2 or USB3 speeds.

Equally you won't notice any difference in graphics performance for general use by dropping the PCI-E to 8x by enabling this. However for games it might cause a performance drop.

[Demon Cleaner]

You can clearly see in the tests they do on every site for this USB stick that USB 3.0 is about 3 times faster than using the same stick in USB 2.0 mode, so I think that there is a difference in the performance.

[Harrison]

USB sticks are soldstate memory so yes, there will benefit if they are using fast enough ram.

Above I was talking about the HDDs connected via external USB3 enclosure or internal SATAIII. Those won't see any transfer speed improvement because the limiting factor is the hdd mechanism speed itself. So at the moment I don't see any benefit in buying USB3 HDD enclosures.

[Demon Cleaner]

I bought it because I wanted an enclosure that I can put on the desk and open to swap disks easily. And as the USB 3.0 version was only 10€ more expensive than the 2.0 one, I chose that one, that was the main reason.

[Harrison]

It definitely looks like a useful enclosure. And if later you do get some faster SATAIII HDDs (once they exist) then you will be ready to use them.

BTW, I thought you were getting rid of using external HDDs? Now that you have loads of 2TB drives internally?

[Demon Cleaner]

I thought that too, but already one disk is almost full with bigger sets. One is for use with uTorrent (sets that I always update), and another one is a backup of that. A 4th one is a backup now of my emulation PC, and the last one holds the system plus all the games, software, movies etc. It also holds now my PS3 games, I already have downloaded 60 games, which take over 500GB, so I already have an external backup of these games, don't want to download the whole lot again. And this disk I will use as external on the PS3 to launch the games.

You know exactly how it is, the more space you have, the more you fill them with "useless" stuff

I want at least to get rid of having several external disks lying around on my desk, so I thought that this enclosure would be the perfect solution.

[Harrison]

You know exactly how it is, the more space you have, the more you fill them with "useless" stuff

Oh so true! You build a new setup with a lot more space. All free and looking huge in capacity. But then a few weeks later you wonder where it all went and are back to where you were before. It's the old "running out of HDD space" topic again!

Have you considered building a second cheap PC with a lot of 2TB drives in it and use it like NAS storage to backup the main PC HDDs over gigabit ethernet? That would remove any external or destop drives/enclosures and the second PC could be hidden anywhere connected to the network. And it wouldn't need to be a very powerful PC. Just one with enough SATA ports. Even built in graphics would be find... You could even run it "headless" via remote access from the main PC. An older Intel 775 motherboard, an E5200 and 2GB ram would be perfect. Could built something like that for around £150 including case. Just the HDDs would add more to the price.