Note that performance was identical regardless of whether I was using Paragon’s NTFS driver or I formatted the drive in OS X’s native HFS+ file format. Copying files to the drive manually I saw very similar numbers over FireWire 800 (53MB/s writes, 78MB/s reads). USB 2.0 performance was aroun 15 - 17MB/s while FireWire 800 managed 47.6MB/s for sequential writes and 75MB/s for sequential reads. All of these are written via the filesystem but are uncached: On the Mac, without Iometer I had to resort to XBench for the performance numbers. It works in both USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 ports. The USB 3.0 cable that ships with the GoFlex Desk USB 3.0 dock.
Random performance remained unchanged regardless of what interface I used. The SATA to USB 3.0 bridge does some additional buffering that may be the cause of the improved performance here. I actually got better performance over USB 3.0 than I did with the drive connected via SATA at around 150MB/s for sequential reads/writes. The only issue is you need to make sure you don't lose the USB 3.0 cable since the drive-end of it is not backwards compatible. It's a shame that USB 3.0 isn't more ubiquitous because this is great performance not to mention that you get backwards compatibility with USB 2.0 systems. USB 3.0 performance is just awesome, the drive performs just like an internal hard drive.
That’s 240Mbps, about half of the USB 2.0 spec maximum. Over USB 2.0 I got around 30MB/s for sequential reads/writes. USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 docks (left and right) The full results are below, but I’ll give you the gist of it here.
Bootable mac usb 2.0 or 3.0 mac os x#
Seagate sent all three docks for review and I benchmarked the 3TB GoFlex Desk under both Windows 7 and Mac OS X 10.6.4 to get an idea for its performance.
USB 2.0, 3.0 and FireWire 800 Performance