Buffalo TURBO USB - Interesting Results

Hi.

I just received my Buffalo Drivestation 1TB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive

It has an unique feature called TURBO USB, which is claimed to increase usb speed by upto 20%.

Below you will find 2 images from HDtune , 1 with TURBO USB disabled and the other with TURBO USB enabled.

You must agree, interesting results an extra 10.5 mb/s with TURBO USB enabled.

http://www.buffalo-technology.com/p...drivestation-turbousb-with-power-saving-mode/

Regards

John.

EDIT : CPU USAGE APPEARS TO BE HIGH AT 24%?
EDIT : I was using optimized power plan, I changed to high performance and the cpu usage droped to 11.7%

TURBO USB disabled



TURBO USB enabled

 

huh, fancy that. pretty nice gain. i wonder how it works.

 

Hi.

Not a lot of information on how it works, burst mode has been mentioned, my cpu usage is very high at 24% though?

Also i dont know what 1TB hdd they have used as i get no information!

Regards

John.

 

tinderbox,
can you add one other thing.
Try copying a large folder, say 4 Gb to the external drive with turboUSB enabled and disabled. If possible, can you use a stopwatch to see what the actual time difference is?

That seems very interesting 38.5mb/sec over USB is really fast, nearly as good as esata.

K-TRON

 

Hi.

WITHOUT TURBO USB



WITH TURBO USB

 

Hi.

I expected more response, my WD 500GB 7200RPM ELEMENTS EXTERNAL only gets 28-29mb/s , and this buffalo one gets 38mb/s that`s a big jump!

John.

 

When you are transferring files, does the cpu load always jump up to ~25% load?
If it does, the software must be caching the files, or organizing them in some way to maximize performance.

K-TRON

 

Hi.

As you can see from my fist 2 photo`s the CPU usage was about the same with TURBO USB enabled or disabled.

I cannot remember what the CPU usage was like with my WD 500GB 7200RPM ELEMENTS EXTERNAL was like.

Regards

John.

EDIT : I was using optimized power plan, I changed to high performance and the cpu usage droped to 11.7%

 

Good post, I have had good results with Buffalo products, I'd recommend them to anyone.

 

Wow that's pretty impressive. Most of the times I see "turbo", I think marketing gimmick lol. I'm glad to see there are some definite improvements

 

Hi.

I decided to have a look inside the Buffalo 1tb and found that it has an Western Digital WD10EACS , a 4 platter hdd.

Regards

John.

 

I presume you had to install a driver for the Turbo mode. If so, I think the turbo driver is compressing / decompressing the files that are being transferred.

An interesting test will be to create a zip or other compressed archive file of 1 to 2GB size and then time how quickly that is copied each way, without and with Turbo mode. I suspect that there will be little difference.

That's not to say that the Turbo mode is ineffective. Do another timed test for copying a folder full of small files. This is where the normal USB transfers go very slowly. The final test would be to zip up that same folder and see how quickly that transfers.

John

 

Hi.

I used Teracopy to move a 2.62gb zipped iso , as it will give me the copy time.

Teracopy also gives a transfer speed in mb/s at the end of the transfer , I think it,s an average i have added it to the end of the results below.

EDIT : TESTS RUN TWICE

WITH TURBO

BUFFALO TO NOTEBOOK 1M10S AT 35 MB/S
NOTEBOOK TO BUFFALO 2M03S AT 22 MB/S


WITHOUT TURBO

BUFFALO TO NOTEBOOK 1M30S AT 30 MB/S
NOTEBOOK TO BUFFALO 2M32S AT 18 MB/S

Regards

John.

 

Thanks for the extra results.

So Turbo mode must do something other than compression (although this may be part of the enhancement).

My next guess is that it is using much bigger packet sizes to push data through the interface with less system overhead than the normal traffic.

John

 

Hi.

Do you have an explanation why the transfer from Buffalo to Notebook is so much faster than the other way round.

Thanks

John.

 

it may be faster handling of the incoming blocks of data so there is less time lag between receipt of a data block and the sending of the "block written, send the next one" message.

John

 

Hi.

I tried my Buffalo on a Puma notebook and the fastest speed i could get was 29mb/s also on an only P4 laptop and only got 15mb/s , all of these have USB 2.0 and have the latest drivers.

But on my PM45 chipset based laptop gives me a read speed of up to 38mb/s

So why the speed discrepancy they are all USB 2.0 ?