Apple → Usb 3.0 bus powered vs. Usb 2.0 bus powered on OSX..

From the last topic of thunderbolt I went and got a usb 3.0 enclosure. It's stainless steel with a rubber band type outline, it's very durable and looks nice, for $19.99. Its also bus powered. I put in a 128 gb samsung 830 in it, and benchmarked it. I also benchmarked my old main laptop external, a bus powered Western Digital my passport 256 drive I got from target for $29.99.

Here is the passport:



I believe it's 7200 rpm. It never seemed horribly slow, I mean it did take a little bit to load sometimes..

Here is the usb 3.0 drive:



Now this is slow for a samsung 830, but it's pretty good for external and bus-powered. I'll later benchmark on a usb 2.0 only port.

Going back to the earlier topic, the usb 3.0 enclosure is $80 cheaper (Most are even less), and this can be used with far more then thunderbolt can. Thunderbolt would give the samsung 830 more speed, but not too much for $80 more, and you sacrifice being able to use the drive on any machine with usb.

Until thunderbolt gets a bit more exposure it's better to go usb 3.0.

What's that program you're using to benchmark?

looks like this?

»www.macupdate.com/app/ma ··· eed-test

Yeah, thats the one. I was looking for disk testing apps and that one had retina compatibility, so.......

Heh, these speeds are actually very good for usb 3. I just found out that it beats out lacie rugged thunderbolt, and beats the lacie big disk at read speeds:

»reviews.cnet.com/externa ··· 1-2.html

This is what i got in a quick test of a Pegasus R4 4x1TB in RAID6 attached to a mini server.