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What speed to expect on an 5400 drive and USB 3.0 enclosure

ducatiti

ducatiti

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
May 18, 2011
932
153
So I purchased a cheap $10 USB 3.0 enclosure from Ebay. Is there such thing as a fake USB 3. How do I know that it's actually USB 3.0 compliant?

Right now it has the speed of 28 megabits/second. Slow right? Or is this a norm for a 5400 drive?
 
What kind of 5400RPM drive?

Is it 2.5", 3.5"?

Usually very cheap USB enclosures have the worst chipsets. I would get something a little more expensive if you plan to back up your data with that.
 
SDAVE said:
What kind of 5400RPM drive?

Is it 2.5", 3.5"?

Usually very cheap USB enclosures have the worst chipsets. I would get something a little more expensive if you plan to back up your data with that.
Click to expand...

It's a 2.5. Cheap chipsets? Makes sense. Would you consider Monoprice enclosures cheap quality wise as well?
 
ducatiti said:
It's a 2.5. Cheap chipsets? Makes sense. Would you consider Monoprice enclosures cheap quality wise as well?
Click to expand...

You should be getting about 70-80MB/sec with USB3.0 on these drives. I assume it's a 500GB-750GB drive? USB 3.0 is 5Gbps (That's 640MB/sec max) so your drive will be the bottleneck.

I would get this (If you also need FW800, this also comes in silver, which the latter does not) or this. The black one is a bit ugly in the second link, but it is cheaper. I'm sure it looks nicer in person. Also the logo can be easily taken off. I just rubbed it off of mine (I have the FW800/USB3.0 version) and it came off easily.

You can always pop in an SSD in this and it will fly on USB 3.0.

Also if you are getting 28MB/sec on your current enclosure, it's definitely running at USB 2.0.

Your MacBook Air definitely supports USB 3.0, so it must be the enclosure.
 
SDAVE said:
You should be getting about 70-80MB/sec with USB3.0 on these drives. I assume it's a 500GB-750GB drive? USB 3.0 is 5Gbps (That's 640MB/sec max) so your drive will be the bottleneck.

I would get this (If you also need FW800, this also comes in silver, which the latter does not) or this. The black one is a bit ugly in the second link, but it is cheaper. I'm sure it looks nicer in person. Also the logo can be easily taken off. I just rubbed it off of mine (I have the FW800/USB3.0 version) and it came off easily.

You can always pop in an SSD in this and it will fly on USB 3.0.

Also if you are getting 28MB/sec on your current enclosure, it's definitely running at USB 2.0.

Your MacBook Air definitely supports USB 3.0, so it must be the enclosure.
Click to expand...

Thank you for your help. This is a link to the enclosure I purchased:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/320971917451?ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1439.l2649

The links you provided are little too pricey for me considering I will just be using a 320gb drive I pulled from my 2011 13" MBP. I may as well just purchase a GoFlex or something similar. This is why I would like a cheaper enclosure.

Do you think that these are any good?:

http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?c_id=103&cp_id=10305&cs_id=1030504&p_id=8086&seq=1&format=2
 
What model is the 320GB drive? Usually with 2.5" drives, the higher the capacity, the faster the datarate.

The enclosure from eBay is $31, not $10, though. It SHOULD work fine.

Monoprice is a great company, I would always trust products from them.
 
I ran a Disk Speed Test on my stock 5400rpm drive in my MacBook - came back at 100MBs read and write.
I placed this same disk into a USB3.0 external enclosure and got almost the same speed.
The bottleneck is the drive itself, not the USB3 interface.

Think I made a video of this in my interface test on YouTube......
 
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