SIIG USB 3.0 card

[MilesAhead]

Put the USB 3.0 SIIG card in my Vista64 PC just now. I don't have the Sharkoon USB 3.0 dock yet. But just trying it out with my Seagate USB 2.0 external, I'm already getting a small boost.

The Seagate typically does sequential read/write of large files at 24 MB/sec.
Plugged into the USB 3.0 card I'm getting about 27 MB/sec reading a large file. Crystal Disk Mark shows sequential scores for read 27 - 29 MB/sec and write 28 - 32 MB/sec.

I'm looking forward to getting the Sharkoon dock next week since the dusty part is all done.

It will be interesting to see what kind of throughput I get.

[MilesAhead]

I should know tomorrow how much throughput I get on this set up. My Sharkoon USB 3.0 dock is supposed to arrive Wed. sometime. It will be a relief if it's fast because opening the box to put the USB 3.0 card in, I could see that I really don't want to mess with that stupid drive cage to add a HD. If I can get 75 or 80% as much throughput via the USB 3.0 that will be plenty fast enough. I can read off one drive and output to another when muxing or whatever without it slowing me down.

[MilesAhead]

I'm running the Sharkoon right now. btw it looks just like Thermaltake BlacX. The drive I have in it is 750 GB Caviar Black. It has 2 partitions. The inside partition is giving Crystal Disk Mark Sequential read/write scores about 86 MB/sec. The partition at the front of the disk is coming in at about 92 MB/sec.

The drive was badly fragmented so I did a quickie defrag with Puran. Writes to the inside partition of large video files range from bout 48 MB/sec to 62 MB/sec. Reads seem much slower ranging from about 28 MB/sec to 40 MB/sec. But my USB 2.0 docks on large reads from the inside partition often slowed to 16 or 17 MB/sec with peak at 24 MB/sec. Rule of thumb I'd have to say performance is roughly 150% of my USB 2.0 dock.

The other thing I notice is the USB 3.0 dock the access light seems to be active frequently when there should be no copying going on. Haven't figured out what it's doing yet. I also have a USB 2.0 external drive plugged into the USB 3.0 card and that is acting normally.

We'll see how it goes!

edit: Macrium backups are way faster!! Seems like this dock is ideal for fast writes of large data while it reads about 1 1/2 times as fast as USB 2.0. Pretty good for copying video to play on my WD player. Looks like a good buy. I had to wait a few extra days for delivery but I got the Sharkoon through Buy.com for $55 shipping included.

Looks like now I need one more WD drive to keep all the docks populated.

edit: a fairer estimate of performance would be 2.x X USB 2.0 I guess. I copied a 25 GB Macrium backup image from my HD to the dock at 58 MB/sec. as shown by KillCopy, which is quite a bit more conservative than Vista64 shell copy speed estimates. KillCopy seems to give pretty accurate throughput readings.

[MilesAhead]

Whoa!! I tried 64 bit Explorer drag & drop of Macrium image. It was able to read off a 6.x GB image at about 90 MB/sec!! Explorer has a tendency to exaggerate so I used a stopwatch and PCalc to calculate the throughput!!

KillCopy is 32 bit so maybe I need to use Explorer with this thing or try adjusting the KillCopy buffers! Kicks ass!!

This number was with WD 750 GB Caviar Black. But even my old WD2000 pulled out of an old HP Pavilion got sequential read/write CrystalDiskMark of 57 MB/sec. Not too shabby!

[dr_ml422]

I'm in asaic. I was getting same 24 or so on my 2.0 Docking Stations w/my WD and Seagate. Maybe sometimes it would zip more according to file size, but I used it mainly as well for Video files. My e-sata was faster than the USB 2.0. Not as fast though but considerably. Especially the esata card I put in my 1st build which to me works better than the integrated one in my M4A78T-E mobo.

What did the USB 3.0 card come out to and where did you get yours?

Keep in mind the cache on both reading from and writing to on the source and destination drives. That will also add to the results. I noticed slower times on my 8mb WD HDDs that I just used for my music and some .mp4 files. Only 80GB so that's what I figure they can hold.

The Docking Stations came a lil late to the party but aren't they one of the best HW inventions? I'm w/you on that inside cage nonsense. Just PnP the HDD in a Dock and let it rip. I don't keep but 1 HDD in my builds. Cooler and the Docks take care of the rest.

[MilesAhead]

I did get the SIIG USB 3.0. So far I'm very happy with it. Seems like good quality. I didn't have to bend the tab to get it in the slot. I bought it at Egg. Since I bought it the price has gone up $10 and the Sharkoon price has gone down $10. If you can wait for the shipping the buy.com is definitely a better deal on the Sharkoon even with the $10 cut.

On my WD 750 GB Caviar Black 32 MB cache I'm easily getting 70 MB/sec and faster reads. It seems to write even faster. I did one run using Clementime stopwatch to calculate it instead of relying on Explorer numbers, and it wrote a 6 GB image file to the drive at 90 MB/sec.

Only thing I can't seem to control is the Sharkoon has an idle time out. It didn't come with any software. Maybe it's hard-wired. On the newer WD drives it doesn't bother me, but on the older 200 GB it makes a loud click when the drive spins down. Just have to get used to it. Caviar black does run hot so maybe it's better if they're not spinning when not in use. It's only a few seconds delay until it spins up. With the speed increase it's well worth the minor annoyance.


It makes a great difference though. Reading large video from HD and outputting to the dock it processed the input file at nearly 100 MB/sec. Makes the computer seem a lot faster. I ordered a 2nd Sharkoon since the SIIG card has 2 ports(I couldn't find the Toaster model for sale in the US anywhere.)

It makes it very nice muxing video. Read in from one drive, write out to another. Much quicker and smoother, plus the internal HD isn't thrashing all the time.,

I'm very happy with the move. I ordered a WD Caviar Black 640 GB with the 64 MB cache. I should get it in a few days. The max on it is supposed to be 126 MB/sec. so it will be interesting to see how well it does in the dock.

[dr_ml422]

So the SIIG USB 3.0 was how much if I may ask? I'll check and see if anyone else is putting them out besides SIIG. Though I think even though my e-sata card is Starr, I'm almost sure SIIG makes the driver if I'm not mistaken.

Don't put your hopes up too soon on the 64MB Cache HDD you ordered. Sometimes they just won't perform that much faster than a 32MB and so forth down the ladder. It's just like that for some reason. Please post the 64MB results. It'd be interesting and I do need some more back up HDDs.

[MilesAhead]

When I got SIIG it was $40 with free shipping. I think it went up $10 at least on Egg. The SIIG uses the NEC chip and driver. If you shop around you can probably do better. If I was going to upgrade another machine I'd have no reason not to get another SIIG. Nothing to configure. Insert the card. Power up, then install the driver from CD. The only real setting is in Device Manager where you can enable Performance over hot swap.

It is actually backward compatible. I plugged an external USB 2.0 drive(Seagate FreeAgent 500 GB) into it and got about a 20% performance boost compared to plugged into a USB 2.0 port.

edit: I just did another Crystal Disk Mark Sequential Read/Write on WD 750 GB Caviar Black w/32 MB cache. This time I did it on the partition at the front of the drive. I got sequential read/write scores of 103 MB/sec.

[dr_ml422]

When I got SIIG it was $40 with free shipping. I think it went up $10 at least on Egg. The SIIG uses the NEC chip and driver. If you shop around you can probably do better. If I was going to upgrade another machine I'd have no reason not to get another SIIG. Nothing to configure. Insert the card. Power up, then install the driver from CD. The only real setting is in Device Manager where you can enable Performance over hot swap.

It is actually backward compatible. I plugged an external USB 2.0 drive(Seagate FreeAgent 500 GB) into it and got about a 20% performance boost compared to plugged into a USB 2.0 port.

edit: I just did another Crystal Disk Mark Sequential Read/Write on WD 750 GB Caviar Black w/32 MB cache. This time I did it on the partition at the front of the drive. I got sequential read/write scores of 103 MB/sec.

That 103 MB/sec is about right. See this:

http://usa.asus.com/News.aspx?N_ID=Xd1xTFmC80hzWfEa

[MilesAhead]

I'm hoping to get the new drive tomorrow. If not, it should come on Thursday. I put a ramdisk on the Vista64 PC just so I could load Firefox if I was in the middle of a mux job. I'll have to try using the regular FF off the HD while running jobs spanning drives. Maybe I can dispense with the ramdisk and get my 128 MB of memory back.

[dr_ml422]

You mean the Vista PC was not strong enough to hit the web while encoding etc...? I have to admit my build handled a encoding and the web quite well. If in fact you're alluding to low performance while muxing.

[MilesAhead]

If it's already open it's fine. Firefox is slow loading off the HD if the drive is maxed out doing a video mux or something drive intensive like that. With the RamDisk I can run it even if I forgot to open Firefox. Plus it was a very long time since I used a RamDisk for anything. I saw a step by step how to run Firefox portable from one.

It's just like if I start the mux going, then realize I want to surf and Firefox isn't open already, from the HD it would take like a minute or more to come up(well, it feels like a minute when you're tapping your finger on the desk.) Just annoying. Off the RamDisk it pops up in a few seconds.

[dr_ml422]

I got you. I remember you posting about the RamDisk too. Yeah it gets annoying when it's like pleading to get outta the system to go free.

Those ASUS 3.0 Mobos got me going there for a bit. I have to chill. Got 2 nice builds. I do have a new case ready. Down boy! Lol...

[MilesAhead]

I got my WD 640 GB with the 64 MB cache. I'm doing the slow format on it now. I did a quick run with Crystal Disk Mark. In the Sharkoon it got sequentials ranging from 130 to 138 MB/sec.. I'm going to have to keep my internal HD defragged just to keep that baby fed!

I'm still waiting on the 2nd Sharkoon to see how it goes with both ports active. With the SD drives coming out there should be more and more bargains on conventional drives(duh, I know.. brilliant prediction heh heh... but I'm psyched right now. Going to try a video mux as soon as this format is finished.)

[dr_ml422]

The regular HDDs are going down regardless in price. The SSD are not panning out as expected and still a ways from really becoming mainstream for loabw.

Post back what you get from different size caches using the USB 3.0 and Sharkoon. In other words see what difference in speed if any there is from say one of your 32 MB HDDs to the 64 MB and so forth. Read n write. It would be interesting to see if any loss is encountered by way of the different caches if any from each drive.

I wonder if the 64 MB is not hitting top speed as there really isn't much 64 bit apps. out there. I don't know if this would factor in but it does sound about right.