Should I get a USB 3.0 PCI card?

[squelchy451]

Hi. I have a cheap 1155 motherboard, so there's no USB 3.0

however, I picked up a pretty good deal on a USB 3.0 2.5" SATA enclosure, and I hooked it up to one of the 5400RPM 2.5" drives I had lying around.

The question is: Is USB 3.0 sufficiently faster than 2.0 that I'd get faster speeds with this external enclosure system?

The USB 3.0 card might be a old school PCI bus or a PCIe x1 card.

Thanks!

 

[natr0n]

just use your usb2 ports with the usb enclosure.

drive is so slow already it wont get faster on usb3

pci bus is limited to max 100/133mb sec

pcie is faster but, wont notice it with such a slow drive to begin with.

dont buy anything basically

 

[The Von Matrices]

You'll definitely see a performance increase in sequential transfers if you use a USB 3.0 port, but if you're writing lots of small files, USB 3.0 vs USB 2.0 will make no difference since the drive will be the limiting factor. A 5400 RPM 2.5" drive probably can do ~60MB/s sustained, and you'd be lucky to get ~25MB/s out of USB 2.0. USB 3.0 would remove this bottleneck.

Also if you do buy a card, don't buy a PCI USB 3.0 card; go for PCIe. The PCI cards consist of PCIe USB 3.0 controllers and a PCIe to PCI bridge chip on them and are more expensive than native PCIe cards.

 

[Peter1986C]

I connect a semi-old 7200rpm drive (WD Caviar SE from 2006) via USB 3.0 for making back-ups (disk images) and only the verification process is noticebly faster than with USB 2.0 (using a Sharkoon PCI-e x1 card). So I doubt you will get higher write speeds with that laptop drive.