i bought a SIIG expresscard34 USB 3.0 and a WD Mybook 3.0 USB3 2TB external drive

vaio z11 with 256GB SSD
the drive inside the mybook 3.0 is supposed to be a 7200rpm black caviar with 64MB cache

MB = megabytes

first i was intrigued by all the marketing hype of 150MB/s burst and avg 90MB/s transfer rates and this was from reviews of the drives themselves

i understood that expresscard limited by PCI throughput to 2.5gigbits but even at half that speed 187MB throughput wouldn't bottleneck the drives

my real world conclusions?
66MB/s continuous transfer of a 85GB single file

sure when i would transfer smaller files i would get bursts of 170MB/s+ but only for like 1 second then it would drop back to below 60MB/s

i finally realized that the drive spindle speed was the limiting factor... 7200rpm even with a 64MB cache cannot transfer data continuously greater than 70MB/s due to spindle speed... i hear 15000rpm raptors can get around 100MB/s continuous... and raid 0 drives can also... but not single drives

so i was a little mad at the misleading marketing and reviews (5x performance! 10x USB 2.0!)

i am getting little over 2x the performance from my USB 2.0 external drives but thats it

 

also the expresscard slot for the z11 is a push in and supposedly "locks" the card in place... however it is not locked in place and easily slides out... so you cannot pull the USB 3.0 cord out of the expresscard without pulling the entire expresscard out of the computer

 

More reinforcement that built in USB 3 slots are preferable.

SSD's and 10K rpm drives will improve performance. Not sure if a 10k drive can go in that enclosure safely however.

 

That is weird, perhaps update / use another driver for your card. Did you test the drive with another computer?

As I mentioned in my eSATA guide for VAIOs http://forum.notebookreview.com/sony/513653-esata-vpc-z-s-y-series-esata-expresscard-review.html, I am getting avg continous speeds over 100mb/s with my Samsung Eco Green drive (5400upm) over ExpressCard->eSATA which must be slower than a Caviar Black.

 

I get about 70mb/sec out of my esata express card connected to a seagate 7200rpm 500gb hard drive which ain't bad as it is nearly full.

How full is your hard drive as they do slow down the more you fill them?

 

AFAIK the mybook 3.0 (and all theses super-large drives > 1TB) are using Raid-0 internally so, as you said, they should benefit from the Raid-boost.

 

Anyone who pulls out plugs by the cord, or without supporting the socket with an equal force, deserve what they get.

And what you're describing is a standard card slot feature. It's not a locking mechanism, but an easy-eject mechanism that allows smaller cards to come out without you having to use pincers.
Pulling out a card is still possible and acceptable, cause the mechanism isn't there to prevent that.

 

Did you disable antivirus during your speed test?

 

are you transferring 1 single large file like i am? mine is 85GB

 

i thought the mybook 3.0 2TB was a single platter?

 

i partitioned it to 400GB (100GB free space) and 1800GB (670GB free space) so all in all i guess it's over 50% full

 

i have MSE as my antivirus that's it, and i don't think it slows it down any

 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 3.0 x64 (C) 2007-2010 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : Crystal Dew World
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s]

Sequential Read : 73.974 MB/s
Sequential Write : 65.186 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 38.774 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 52.829 MB/s
Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 0.721 MB/s [ 176.0 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 1.928 MB/s [ 470.6 IOPS]
Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 0.737 MB/s [ 179.9 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 1.799 MB/s [ 439.3 IOPS]

Test : 1000 MB [H: 74.6% (291.2/390.6 GB)] (x5)
Date : 2010/09/23 10:41:05
OS : Windows 7 [6.1 Build 7600] (x64)

 

Antivirus should slow tests down. It's scanning everything as it reads/writes. Try disabling it and re-running? (or boot into safe mode).

 

just did it ran same test
virtually no change