I just bought an add-on USB3 adapter and outboard USB3/sata docking station, and I've been comparing the performance with my old e-sata outboard docking station. Not so good :(
After getting some unreliable results with hdparm, I settled on copying one 3GB file from one partition of the outboard drive to another partition of the same drive. These results are highly reproducible, and favor e-sata over USB3 by a large margin. Over at least six trials on each docking station I consistently get 105 seconds for USB and 84 seconds for e-sata, a 5:4 ratio in favor of e-sata. I used the same hard disk and the same pci-e slot in the same minimally-loaded machine for all the runs, and got very consistent results every time. Basically, the USB3/sata docking station gets the same throughput as the older sata 1 drives connected to the onboard pci sata controller, which is still pretty respectable for an outboard drive, I think. So, has anyone out there done similar tests on USB3 drives yet?
