IO Level Up

[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.

[Demon Cleaner]

Already thought about that, but wouldn't I need f.ex. an expensive RAID card to make it at least a bit more secure?

At the moment I only have one other PC, my emulation PC, which is connected to the network, as you know I do the file sharing between them. All the files I need I can access from there, so I don't actually need a NAS. And in my main PC I have 9 slots for 3.5" disks, so there is not really any need to buy another external case.

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.

SATA II is faster than USB 2.0, and USB 3.0 is faster than USB 2.0, so there will actually be an increase of speed, perhaps not the full SATA II speed, but at least the full USB 3.0 speed, if I think correctly.

[Harrison]

The USB3 or SATAIII interfaces might be faster, but they can only move the data as fast as the physical HDD mechanism will allow.

USB3 for example has a maximum theoretical limit of 3.2 Gbps (400MB/s) but for example a Samsung F1 7200RPM HDD has a maximum transfer rate of about 116 MB/s, and an average sustained read speed of 94MB/s. But with overhead this reduces further to more like 70MB/s over USB3. Compared to the same drive on SATA it would achieve full 94MB/s sustained transfer speed.

SATAIII and USB3 won't really come into their own for a while yet, when true SATAIII drives get released. I'm not sure how they can make the sustained transfer speed faster for spinning HDDs as the moving parts can only move so fast. However, for solidstate drives, they are already showing SATAIII advantages with over 300MB/s rates possible. SSD HDD's are a bit too limited in drive size at the moment, but I'm sure that will change fairly quickly.

[Demon Cleaner]

Ok, so here we go, I did some tests:

Sony USB2 stick on USB2:



Kingston USB3 stick on USB2:



Kingston USB3 stick on USB3:



SATA II disk on USB2:



Same SATA II disk on USB3:



You can clearly see that there is a difference, meaning an increase of speed, when using USB3.

However I also tested with the IO Level Up set to USB3, but there was no difference as to leave it disabled.