E6410 Owner's Thread

Just bought one of these...

Expresscard 54 to USB 3.0 Adapter (Fully Inside Laptop) - eBay (item 300499775828 end time Mar-31-11 19:54:20 PDT)

Now I can keep my E6410 for a while.

 

Ooh that adapter is much nicer than the bulky thing I bought a while back, thanks for posting it!

Have you had a chance to test performance? I could easily pull 70 MB/s reads from a portable drive with my Icy Box adapter but the bulk makes it pretty annoying to use.

 

There's an entire thread devoted to that topic. No ExpressCard adapter has true USB 3.0 throughput. In addition, USB powered devices apparently require a jumper to a real USB port. In other words, it isn't a real substitute for native USB 3.0!

 

(i) How many of the "real" USB 3.0 devices actually give full USB 3.0 throughput? Last time I looked there was a significant gap between theory and reality.

(ii) The card linked to here includes a cable to take power from another USB port so no other power connections should be needed.

John

 

IIRC EC supports around 2-3 GBps, which is far superior to 480 MBps. Also I've powered a USB 2.0 compatible hard drive from a similar card, it shouldn't be a problem in real life conditions, certainly not until USB 3 becomes dominant.

 

I think you are fine as well, as long as you use 1 USB port at a time. If you use the 2, or the device require more power, it might be slower or not work. I don't think it will be a problem for USB 3.0 memory key

 

Is it working well?

I'm thinking of getting a USB 3 enclosure and putting in a 500GB 7200 RPM Western Digital Caviar Black...but I want to make sure that:

1) The eBay USB 3 Card can power it.

2) The speeds are quick.

Opinions?

 

You'd be better off with eSata. The real problem is that no ExpressCard adapter can support the full USB 3.0 specification. Even worse, you have to run a jumper cable to an adjacent USB 2.0 port to power this USB 3.0 adapter, and even then, the USB 3.0 standard allows for a higher power output than USB 2.0 So with an adapter, you don't have the data transfer rate or power output of USB 3.0.

Personally, I don't think that devices that aren't compliant with USB 3.0 standards should get the USB 3.0 label. It's just wrong and somewhat deceptive.

 

I did a very unscientific test just copying and moving files to and from the drive using teracopy.

from my observations, the transfer rate while using usb 2.0 ports on my notebook settled to around 40-50mb/sec, but when using the usb 3.0 card it settled to around 55-60mb/sec.

i did a test with the usb power cable plugged in and one without and did not observe any differences in speed. it still hovered around 55-60mb/sec. i plugged the usb cable into one of the usb 2.0 ports on my notebook. this is with only 1 usb 3.0 device plugged in.

i tested using a wd passport essential se 1tb usb 3.0 and a 6gb mkv movie file.

the ports on the card were not perfectly shaped upon arrival. i had to push a usb connector into it to reshape it. not a big deal.

the speeds dont seem significantly better but i like having more usb ports, and i get to put that expresscard slot to use finally.

i'm not very tech saavy, if there is anything i can do to improve the tests, please let me know and i will try to help.

 

Your device is probably what limits the transfer speed.
external HDD's powered by USB, are usually 4800RPM HDD's, and not 5400 or 7200RPM.
What you need to test is an external desktop 7200RPM HDD (or an SSD) in an external HDD that require power from a plug, and now compare.

But if you go to all that, might as well use eSATA. You'll get the max transfer speed of the HDD or SSD. In addition, eSATA is optimized for data transfer while USB (all versions) is not. And it doesn't use the CPU to perform any data access/transfer from the external drive. Hence why we never dump SATA for USB 3.0 inside the computer.