I finally tasted the speed of USB3!

[madrag]

I have my Mini for almost one year now, but didn't have any USB3 drive until now.

I bought the Lacie Minimus USB3 3TB.

As many know, USB2 on the Mac isn't that fast, and I was kind of worried that USB3 wasn't that fast, but boy! I was wrong!

My internal HDD got this with the blackmagic test:
(averages - high)
W: 102 MB/s
R: 102 MB/s

And the Lacie go this:
W: 159 MB/s
R: 155 MB/s

I had a small hickup at the first time I plugged it, it was getting USB2 speeds, and then I read that the bus will take the speed of the first devices plugged, I just swapped ports and it gained the USB3 speed.

Does it show that I'm happy?

Anyone else with happy encounters with USB3?

 

[paulrbeers]

As many know, USB2 isn't that fast

Fixed that for you. Mac or PC, doesn't matter. USB maxes out at only about 30MB/s on any platform.

 

[madrag]

Fixed that for you. Mac or PC, doesn't matter. USB maxes out at only about 30MB/s on any platform.

I had a Lacie USB2 four years ago, and it was way slower than 30MB/s on my Mac, on a PC it was much faster, that's why I mentioned on the Mac it is slower.

BTW, when this new external was plugged to my Mac using USB2 speeds, it was over 30MB/s, almost 35MB/s!

 

[haravikk]

Fixed that for you. Mac or PC, doesn't matter. USB maxes out at only about 30MB/s on any platform.

Personally I'd say the speeds are 30-40mb/sec as I use USB for my Time Machine backup drive and they average closer to the 40mb mark.

But USB3 is definitely a huge improvement; it's fast enough that although I'll need to move my internal hard drives into an external enclosure that USB3 may actually be fast enough for my needs, which is something I simply wouldn't have considered with USB2. Okay so there's latency to contend with, but I'll be using an internal SSD to eliminate most of that.