Startek USB 3.0 card not running at 3.0 speeds

[Kristi2k]

Hi,

I have purchase the STARTECH PEXUSB3S2 PCI Express card for my new system (i5) I built last year. I also purchased a Western Digital MyBook 3.0 external hard drive. It is USB 3.0 capable and comes with the 3.0 cable.

I have install the latest drivers for the STARTECH PEXUSB3S2 and also flashed the external drive with the latest firmware. I am running Windows 7 x64 as well.

Max transfer rate is 25MB/s. I am mostly transferring photos & documents.

Any suggestions?

 

[superunknown98]

How are you measuring bandwidth? Are you copying files from a pc to the mybook? what kind of files? how big are they? You probably won't see max speeds unless you copy large files that are sequentially readable. You won't see anything near what usb 3 is capable of because the mybook is still a regular hard drive.

 

[Paperdoc]

I agree you won't see anything close to 5 or 5 Gb/s, BUT most SATA drives on internal SATA ports can achieve 60 to 90 MB/s, and eSATA-connected external drives also can do that. A few HDD's are even faster. It is fully expected that, since that speed is actually imposed by the HDD and not by the interface, a USB3 interface capable of more will allow those same speeds to be achieved. Maybe slightly less speed than eSATA because a form of "translation" between SATA and USB interfaces is necessary, but still I'd expect better than the 25 MB/s number OP is quoting. That is USB2 speeds!

What about the PCIe bus? I don't remember its speed limits. To get USB3 to work at its potential speed, does one need an interface card in the PCIe x4 , x8 or x16 range?

 

[Kristi2k]

I didn't really expect to get the full listed bandwidth but atleast more than what I can get with USB 2.0 speeds.

The drive is a SATA drive too.


I'm transferring 10MB photo files and some larger 100MB exe files.

 

[Davidh373]

I don't think USB 3.0 will show any benefits until we get to the point where external drives come standard with SSDs. You got the HDD anyway, extra storage is never a bad thing .

 

[superunknown98]

I would guess that the drive in your Western Digital MyBook 3.0, is a 5400rpm disk, which would further slow it down. Anyway, I read a few reviews on newegg for the 1TB drive and others have been hitting around 40MB/s copying whole video directories. I don't think 100mb files are going to provide max transfer rates. Try something in the GB range.