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USB 3.0, Ultimate USB Revolution
Just when you thought that the USB 2.0 specification was the end of the road for the Universal Serial Bus interface, Intel went and threw the USB 3.0 (a.k.a. SuperSpeed USB) specification at consumers in 2009. If you haven't heard of the computer world's newest SuperSpeed USB interface or you've been sleeping under a rock, I highly recommend, prior to going through this review, that you familiarize yourself with this USB 3.0 FAQ. But to quickly recap the FAQ, the USB 3.0 electrical interface is packaged into familiar USB form factor sized connectors to achieve up to a theoretical 4.8Gbps (Gigabit) of maximum raw data throughput; this is up to 10x faster than the existing and archaic USB 2.0, which runs at 480Mbps (Megabit).
The specification is also meant to be fully backwards compatible with USB 2.0 and USB 1.1 devices and hosts, which means you can happily keep on plugging your USB 2.0 flash drives and USB gaming mice into a USB 3.0 port, and they'll keep on working as reliably as always. With few or no devices on show for the majority of 2009, I've finally seen a multitude of USB 3.0 devices creeping into the market this year, including but not limited to Western Digital's very own My Book 3.0 and the Seagate BlackArmor 500GB external USB 3.0 hard drive.
BlackArmor PS 110, Now a USB 3.0 Hard Drive
Seagate bundles its BlackArmor PS 110 in a neat kit, which includes the USB 3.0 hard drive itself; one USB 3.0 cable approximately 16" (40 cm) long (micro-USB 3.0 type B to type A connector); a USB 3.0 ExpressCard to help get the most out of your investment; and lastly, another auxiliary cable, featuring a USB 2.0 Type A connector on one side and 1.8mm barrel jack on the other to power both ExpressCard and attached BlackArmor drive.
The BlackArmor PS 110 packs with the USB 3.0 hard drive itself, USB 3.0 ExpressCard, auxiliary USB power cable, a USB 3.0 micro-B cable.
The BlackArmor PS 110 500GB drive is built in a closed metal shell very similar in dimensions and aesthetics to my originally reviewed Seagate Freeagent Go 500GB USB 2.0 drive. The black top of the PS110 drive features one lone green LED that indicates power and activity when connected and installed on supported operating systems in either USB 2.0 or USB 3.0 modes. Alongside the power/activity LED, Seagates own logo extrudes from the top with a light blue color. A LCD capacity indicator similar to the Verbatim InSight or Western Digital My Passport Studiowould have been a welcome addition to add some value added features to a slim product package.
The back of the drive features a USB 3.0 Micro-USB Type B receptacle that supports connection via either the included USB 3.0 cable or via a relatively new micro-USB 2.0 cable. Unfortunately, micro-USB mechanical interfaces are not a regular occurrence with external USB 2.0 hard drives since many manufacturers, Seagate included, chose the Mini-USB connector instead on previous generations of external drives. Since the USB 3.0 standard is also quite new, you'll have quite an issue finding a local replacement USB 3.0 cable should you lose it.
The original FreeAgent Go (top) has a mini-B whereas the new BlackArmor PS 110 has a completely new micro-B USB 3.0 connector that also accepts micro-B USB 2.0 cables.
From left, USB 2.0 standard-A plug, USB 3.0 standard-A plug, mini-B USB 2.0 connector, micro-B USB 3.0 connector.
If all the included items sound slightly complicated to set up, then don't panic, they are. Fortunately, Seagate includes a quick start guide to help get you going. To begin with, you're going to need a computer featuring a USB 2.0 port and archiving software since Seagate conveniently stored all drivers for the USB 3.0 ExpressCard on the BlackArmor PS 110 itself in a ZIP archive. Thankfully, the BlackArmor PS110 is backwards compatible with the USB 2.0 specification which will allow you to connect the drive to your pre-existing USB ports and install the required drivers, and reconnect it to a USB 3.0 port. Seagate also packages the USB 3.0 hard drive with a neat backup and restore software package, rebranded from Acronis.
Have USB 3.0, Need Ports...
As part of the package, Seagate bundles the kit with a USB 3.0 host card built around the ExpressCard/34 form factor and interface. The ExpressCard as of this writing is version 1.0 which is in a nut shell PCI Express 1.0 using just x1. With this card, you can expect up to 250MB/s, at which speed still far exceeds what Seagate promised. It's also important to note that the included ExpressCard features only one USB 3.0 port that requires additional power from an adjacent USB 2.0 port capable of supplying enough current to power both ExpressCard and USB 3.0 drive.
If you do plan on utilizing this drive on other non-USB 3.0 capable notebooks at full SuperSpeed, be prepared to either travel with a bunch of cables or have a really unattractive cable mess sticking awkwardly out of your notebook.
Since the provided USB 3.0 ExpressCard is obviously made for notebooks, so to run BlackArmor PS 110 at SuperSpeed mode on a desktop computer, you will need an internal USB 3.0 PCIe card which conveniently fits any PCIe x1 to x16 sized slot. As illustrated in the Performance section, I also utilized a Gigabyte GA-USB3 PCIe x1 USB 3.0 card for benchmarking purpose. The Gigabyte card features 2x USB 3.0 Type A receptacles, and requires that a traditional 4-pin Molex power connector be attached in order for it to function and supply the full 900mA of current on each of its USB ports. This PCIe card will not run alone on the PCIe supplied power.
The good news is that the BlackArmor drive will operate just fine over either one USB 3.0 port or one USB 2.0 port. I did not encounter any powering issues with the PS 110 hard drive similar to other 2.5" based external USB 2.0 hard drives failing to spin up due to a lack of enough current and proper 5V regulation on the USB port.
Both the PCIe v1.0 x1 and ExpressCard interface on both my desktop and notebook will hopefully allow access to the theoretical maximum achievable bandwidth for USB 3.0 (600MB/s including protocol overhead) over the 250 MegaBytes per second (MB/s) PCI Express v1.0 interface featured on my ASUS P5B Deluxe WiFi motherboard and 500 MB/s PCI Express v2.0 interface featured on my ASUS P7P55D LE motherboard.
Backup & Management Software
Once the drive is installed, you'll want to start exploring some of the value added software Seagate added with the kit. Their own rebranded full version of Acronis backup software called BlackArmor Backup resides on the hard drive and is not crippled in any way beyond its one user license. Additional licenses can be purchased via the software user interface if needed.
Starting up BlackArmor Backup the first thing that will greet you is the One-Click Protection window prompting you to add your local computer to BlackArmor Backup schedule.
Backups can be encrypted (up to AES 256-bit), password protected, split and spanned across multiple files, throttled to retain some performance on the PC while backing up data on a schedule and auto consolidated (combining multiple backups together). In short, there isn't much that the Seagate BlackArmor backup software cannot do since it's basically just a rebranded suite of Acronis own backup software.
The same extensive options also exist for scheduling your backups on a variety of criteria including an event or time. This should satisfy anyone looking for a fully featured backup application, even those hardened IT administrators. For those looking for a simpler option in backing up your data, the software wizard will also highlight specific areas of your computer to backup should you prefer not to archive all those secret emails but only keep the photos from last years trip to Argentina.
Another useful screen to navigate to is the Tasks and Log screen which will show you all scheduled backups and occurances so you'll know when to take your BlackArmor PS 110 on short trips without interrupting your scheduled backups.
The last screen I would like to highlight is the Protection State and Utilities screens. The Protection State screen will give you a quick summary of the backups completed, the current state of your schedule and the amount of available space for future backups while the Utilities screen provides users access to handy DriveCleaner, File Shredder and System Clean-up applications that are pretty self-explanatory.
Seagate also includes bootable rescue media builder software to build an ISO image or burn a recovery disc straight to CD. At the time of writing the software supplied is only supported for Microsoft Windows based operating systems.
In-depth Look at BlackArmor USB 3.0 Performance
Benchmarking was performed on a desktop system with a Core 2 Duo E6600 processor built into a ASUS P5B Deluxe WiFi motherboard with a ZOTAC GeForce GTX 260 AMP2! Edition graphics card featuring a Intel-based USB host controller (P965 North Bridge and ICH8 South Bridge) and a Hewlett Packard Pavilion dv6662se Entertainment notebook featuring an Intel-based USB host controller. To verify results obtained from the desktop system I also confirmed benchmarks on the ASUS P7P55D LE.
The Seagate BlackArmor PS 110 500GB USB 3.0 hard drive was directly connected to either the supplied Seagate USB 3.0 ExpressCard or a Gigabyte USB 3.0 PCI Express (PCIe) x1 card (GA-USB3). Both USB 3.0 hosts feature an NEC xHCI USB 3.0 Host controller chip. The ASUS P5B motherboard features PCIe v1.0 x1 slots which can support a maximum bandwidth up to 250 MegaBytes per second (MB/s) whereas the ASUS P7P55D LE motherboard features PCIe x1 v2.0 slots which can support up to 500 MB/s. The operating system used in all tests was Microsoft's newest OS, Windows 7 64-bit.
Benchmark will put Seagate's claim of up to "3x faster than USB 2.0 drives" to the test using HDTune and SiSoft Sandra for synthetic performance evaluation, and Microsoft's own Robocopy tool for real-world performance. Since benchmarking any given interface will vary in results dependant on the actual hardware embedded in the device under test, I've added a short table to summarize the drives contained in each test device that is being benchmarked.
What is interesting to note is that even though the BlackArmor PS 110 uses a USB 3.0 interface, the drive contained in the metal shell is actually capable of SATA 300 but is configured as SATA150 whereas even the previous generation of FreeAgent Go 500GB was configured as a SATA300. On top of this, the PS 110 features a fast 7200 rpm spinning platter with twice the buffer of the previous generation FreeAgent Go.
Beginning with HDTune, I ran the Seagate BlackArmor PS 110 500GB hard drive over its USB 3.0 interface on the bundled USB 3.0 ExpressCard with my HP notebook.
Accessing the drive over the USB 3.0, ExpressCard showed good data transfer rates up to a maximum of 96.3 Megabytes per second (MB/s) for read and 60.9 MB/s for write operations. The Burst rate for either also peaked at 90-95 MB/s which exceeds the average performance of USB 2.0 based external hard drives by approximately three times. CPU usage also appears to be really low on average with less than 10% of the CPU being utilized for such fast file transfer operations. Your mileage may vary depending on the combination of USB 3.0 host card, CPU and motherboard used.
Next I tested the PS 110 hard drive with HDTune over a Gigabyte USB 3.0 PCIe card on my desktop system. (I'm not quite sure why the CPU usage was reported as -1.0%, but it may have something to do with the combination of desktop motherboard, Gigabyte USB 3.0 host card and operating system.)
The read performance over PCIe card was fairly similar to the read performance via the included ExpressCard interface which is a good sign that ExpressCard solutions can keep up with their PCIe based counterparts. Write performance on the other hand showed large performance differences with the PCIe interface being 20MB/s faster on maximum and average throughput. For some reason the performance drop-off over the PCI Express card seems to occur far earlier in the benchmarking, possibly due to the buffer on the hard drive being exhausted and slowing down transfer speeds. Access times on either interfaces through USB 3.0 still average at approximately 15-16 milli-seconds (ms) whereas USB 2.0 flash drives generally achieve <1 ms.
As part of my synthetic comparison benchmark using SiSoft Sandra's Removable Storage benchmark, I put the Seagate FreeAgent Go 500 GB USB 2.0 using a USB 2.0 EHCI (Enhanced Host Controller Interface) against Seagate's USB 3.0 creation over both the included Seagate USB 3.0 ExpressCard using a USB 3.0 xHCI (Extensible Host Controller Interface) and the Gigabyte USB 3.0 PCI Express card. During benchmarking, it was observed that there was no noticable difference in performance between either USB 3.0 interface cards, probably because SiSoft Sandra was using smaller file sizes that don't exhaust the hard drive's on-board buffer and thus lead to increased benchmark results. This benchmark also included the performance of the Seagate BlackArmor PS 110 USB 3 hard drive while connected over a USB 2.0 EHCI interface.
The Seagate BlackArmor PS 110 took a lead on all fronts when utilized over the USB 3.0 SuperSpeed interface scoring a breath-taking 98.13MB/s read and 55.47MB/s write performance in SiSoft Sandra. Read performance stays consistently high between 60 to 100MB/s until benchmarking smaller file sizes. with both 32 kB and 512 byte sized files, performance took a severe beating reaching an all time low of only 0.068MB/s for write and 6.58 MB/s for read. Fortunately, these types of file sizes are rarely used and the majority of users will probably be reserving capacity on the BlackArmor PS 110 for archiving their D-SLR photos, movies or music collection.
As expected, using the Seagate BlackArmor PS 110 over a EHCI USB 2.0 based host controller severely throttles the transfer speeds of the drive, but still shows an overall improvement, even over the previous generation of USB 2.0 external disk drives, the Seagate FreeAgent Go. Even when used without a USB 3.0 interface, the BlackArmor PS 110 still clearly leads Seagate's new product-line.
As an added bonus benchmark, I also benchmarked a Western Digital My Book 3.0 USB 3.0 hard drive with SiSoft Sandra over the same USB 3.0 interfaces to highlight the difference in performance of a 2.5" versus a 3.5" external hard drive over the USB 3.0 interface.
While testing a 3.5" USB 3.0 hard drive versus a 2.5" based USB 3.0 external hard drive might not seem fair to some people, I think it's important to show that there is more performance to be gained over the USB 3.0 interface and to also give readers some comparable results when the modern media often over-hypes a new interface standard and reviews only offer a small comparison on performance versus devices in a similar class.
The Seagate BlackArmor PS 110 based 2.5" USB 3.0 hard drive only features half of the buffer memory than the Western Digital 3.5" based USB 3.0 hard drive, but still manages to keep performance relatively close to the Western Digital drive. One wonders what the performance of the PS 110 would be if Seagate had added twice the buffer. My real-world results were measured using Microsoft's own Robocopy tool to measure performance for both read and write operations on a 640MB ISO image file.
With my benchmarking concluded, it's fairly evident that the real-world results mimic the SiSoft Sandra scores for either USB 3.0 devices and show that the Seagate BlackArmor PS 110 USB 3.0 hard drive has nearly up to 3x the advantage over the older generation USB 2.0 Seagate FreeAgent Go series.
The Seagate BlackArmor PS 110 easily scored 57.38MB/s transfer speeds while writing and 90.48MB/s for reading data from the drive whereas the older Seagate FreeAgent Go over a USB 2.0 interface only scores 24MB/s for write and 32.7MB/s for read speeds. This performance was obviously still far from the full advertised SuperSpeed USB 3.0 numbers the USB-IF has been teasing consumers with, but these limitations are hard to overcome with traditional magnetic platter based hard disk drives and may prompt the adoption of solid state storage into USB 3.0 enclosures faster than some people are anticipating.
While the Western Digital My Book 3.0 1TB performed noticeably speedier (nearly 20MB/s faster) in read operations than the BlackArmor PS 110, the trade-off was a slightly lower score for write performance (5MB/s slower) which is to be expected from a 3.5" sized external USB 3.0 hard drive. Unfortunately, this performance advantage comes at the price of portability which the BlackArmor PS 110 does not suffer from.
Recap
The SuperSpeed USB 3.0 interface clearly shows strong advantages over the antiquated Hi-Speed USB 2.0 standard, and the Seagate BlackArmor PS 110 reflects this with its amazingly fast benchmark scores. With this new interface now being marketed heavily by nearly every manufacturer, I should see a new age of data storage approach where capacities become frivolous, and concerns about how long it will take to backup your entire media server will become a thing of the past. Seagate offers an interesting kit to new-comers to USB 3.0 that is both attractive and offers good value versus performance which is, I feel, not something the average computer user can pass up on.
Reviewed by Marco Hies, Technical Editor
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Hardware
