USB 2.0 vs USB 3.0, is it really ten times…

I finally had a chance to try out our Asus 1018P Netbook’s USB 3.0 capabilities. The thought of moving photos around 10 times faster is very appealing. Especially as my backup strategy for our African Honeymoon is the netbook, with it’s upgraded 500GB Seagate Hybrid hard drive and a Toshiba Canvio 1TB USB 3.0 portable Hard disk. Being able to do everything 10 times faster will make everything less time consuming and presumably it’ll use less battery juice per backup as well.

How did I go about the test? Here’s my setup:

The Asus 1018P netbook with the USB 3.0 drivers installed (they are not in Windows or Windows Update)
A Toshiba Canvio 1TB USB 3.0 Hard Drive
A Toshiba Canvio 1TB USB 2.0 Hard Drive
The same 1,430 photos loaded on the each hard drive, a total of ~17Gb

In theory the only delta between the two test runs (USB 2.0 vs. 3.0) is the USB hardware\drivers. There’s a possibility that the Canvio hard drives are slightly different but they are both a less than a month old so I really doubt they will be slower than their USB controllers. I ran each test once, copying the files from the hard drive to the netbook using the ever faithful robocopy. So is it really ten times faster? Here are the results:

	Time	Bytes/sec.	MegaBytes/min
USB 2.0	0:10:38	28,867,229	1,651.796
USB 3.0	0:05:15	59,272,341	3,391.590

So, it’s not ten times faster, it’s not even five times faster, it’s a relatively modest twice as faster! That’s useful but a far cry from my expectations!

USB 2.0 vs USB 3.0, is it really ten times faster?