I have a hard drive that benchmarks at about 100 MB/s through sata with current hardware, and a usb3 enclosure for it. If this is connected to a nec usb2 pci board on the old 533 MHz Celeron system, what performance is likely? The same, better, worse?

If a usb3 board is found that connects this usb3 drive to the pci bus, is it likely to outperform a nec usb2 board?

Hi there,

a lot worse. The best that a USB2 mass storage device can do in real life is about 35..38MB/s. USB2 has a nominal max of 480Mbps, which would allow for 60MB/s, but a part of this bandwidth is reserved for devices operating at lower speeds (12Mbps, 1.5Mbps) and for occasional inquiries ("Anyone new on the bus? Anyone left the party?"), and then these 480Mbps are including handshake and sync issues. Typical sustained speed for USB2 HDDs is about 30MB/s, momentarily up to 35MB/s.

But is that old Celeron, huffing at 533MHz, capable of handling that speed? I don't know. Maybe, maybe not. If it is, it'll be at the cost of high CPU load.

In a fast PC - yes, very probably. In the old Celeron/533 we're talking about - probably not. Not significantly, anyway.

[X] Doc CPU

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And if it is a USB3 enclosure that is connected to a USB2-to-PCI board?

Anyway, what's an example of a USB3-to-PCI (not PCIe) board?
EDIT: found one here, but how good is it? Better than NEC USB2 boards when connecting the usb3 drive, worse when connecting usb2 devices?

USB 2.0 controller with a USB 3.0 HDD- USB 2.0 speeds.
USB 3.0 controller with a USB 2.0 HDD- USB 2.0 speeds.

There might be a very, very minor speed improvement in either of those cases, but if there is it would be less than 10% and due to newer hardware (while USB is pretty much sorted out, things do improve slightly over time)

In a 'fast' PC- yes. Not 'probably'. If there isnt a speed improvement over USB 2.0 or 'mix and match' USB 2.0/3.0 setups, there is a serious issue (or your using a HDD that wont get faster speeds than 40MB/sec or so, which is about as fast as USB 2.0 can go).

In a celeron 533- yes, but by how much is debatable. It would be an interesting test.

If your doing this for faster transfers to a HDD, I wouldnt use USB, I'd be looking into a PCI eSATA card. eSATA doesnt have the overheads/heavy CPU use of USB, and even SATA1 (SATA 150) is faster than most HDDs around today. Even the 'faster than SATA1 HDDs' will be slower than SATA1 once you've written a couple of 100GB or so, because mechanical HDDs are fastest at sector 1, then speeds drop off. Even the fastest mechanical HDDs around now drop below 100MB/sec when they get deep into the drive, and if it can hit 60MB/sec at the end of the drive its doing well.

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Hi there,

and there is another issue that reduces speed drastically: fragmentation, because the number of seek operations in relation to the amount of data being read or written increases. How much actually, depends on the file system.

And obviously, the file system being used also affects the speed. Some months ago I reformatted an external USB2 drive (a 1TB Samsung inside a cheap noname-enclosure, both purchased separately and assembled on my own). Up to that time it was formatted to FAT32 and achieved transfer speeds of about 30MB/s with long linear writes (files in the realm of GB). After I re-formatted it to ext3, the speed increased to about 36MB/s. That caught me with surprise, because I'd never thought ext3 was that much more efficient than the "primitive", though robust FAT32.

[X] Doc CPU

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USB 3 controller on legacy PCI seems grossly overpriced. What is the likely cost of an eSATA controller on legacy PCI plus an eSATA to SATA 3 adaptor for the drive?

This one seems an absolute bargain at £11, and according to this it includes the VIA Vectro VT6214L chipset which the VIA site brags about as follows:

"Certified by the USB Implementers Forum for Hi-Speed USB2.0 operation, the VIA Vectro VT6214L is one of the top USB2.0 performers in the industry".

Any recommendations against or in favour of this board?

The SATA 3 drive would go inside, what is the likely performance in this case, given that the drive benchmarks at about 100 MB/s with current hardware and the controller is SATA I, not 3? Not sure about this actually.

I've had a few older PowerMac's that would argue that PCI X was only in servers

Oh, noes, its marketing. As in' watch out, dont step in the marketing!'.

VIA USB (+ SATA etc.) controllers work, but are rather lackluster at best.

VT6214L is just a slightly upgraded version of the VT6212.

There will also be a 2nd VIA chip for the SATA + IDE controllers (havent been bothered to check which one, it doesnt make that much difference).

But that will lead to even more congestion on the card if you try to use it for SATA/IDE + USB. PCI doesnt really have the bandwidth to satisfy SATA, let alone SATA + USB.

There wont be much difference between SATA1 and SATA3 in general on 'slow' drives (yes, 100MB/sec seems fast, but its not compared to the fastest of the current SATA3 HDDs which can hit 200MB/sec). Even if you could get a SATA3 PCI card, its pointless, SATA1 has more bandwidth than PCI (150MB/sec vs 133MB/sec)

If you want to use the drive internally, why even bother with a SATA+ IDE + USB card? You could get a Silicon image (SiL) card which as far as I know work better than the VIA junk.

As for 'likely performance' of the linked VIA SATA+IDE+USB card-
Using USB alone, it would be pretty much the same as the other VIA card.
Using SATA/IDE + USB- performance would be worse.

Even if the HDD benchmarks at 100MB/sec doesnt mean you will get that in the real world, you're likely to have mismatched speeds between HDDs(if you're got a IDE HDD of similar age to the celeron 533 its never going to read fast enough to copy at the SATA drives max speed). Copying from RAM should happen about as fast as possible, but its likely you have 512MB or less on the celeron, so that isnt going to matter much......

Is it even worth stuffing aroudn with this old system? You could get a Core 2 Duo 2nd hand/refurbished for 70 quid or less, with internal SATA ports, USB 2.0 onboard, a much faster CPU, more RAM and similar or lower power consumption.

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I doubt anyone would consider an apple "an ordinary desktop PC" would they? But thanks for pointing out those weird apple systems had them.

I'd doubt that any fast choice would deliver much on the OP's old system. Maybe if it had rambus ram and ran off of a ramdrive.

I have a great deal of love for those weird apple systems

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I need the USB2/3 ports for other uses too (laser printer, flash drives, etc). Only looking at SATA because you all agree the 100 MB/s drive won't work that fast over USB 2 or 3.

So it's either a USB board, or a USB+SATA board, or two boards.

If the SATA controller were on a separate board would there be no congestion?

Couldn't find a SiL USB controller so you must be talking about just SATA, right? Would rather sort out the USB part first and see how it performs.

Good point. Had one and I sold it. But the old 533 MHz Celeron was not sellable so it was kept piling up dust until one day my laptop broke down so it came back to life. Until a new PC was bought. And then the new PC broke down too, so back to the old system again. If this old system is going to be kept, it better play the role of the emergency fall-back.

Why not, aren't the clusters hundreds of times smaller than 384 MB?

Since you have seen good reviews for NEC USB boards, would you recommend any of the following?

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/3908058434...%3AMEBIDX%3AIT

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/3108328856...%3AMEBIDX%3AIT

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/4005439149...%3AMEBIDX%3AIT

Woah, I never said that. Sorry if thats what you read.

I'm not sure how fast you'll get over USB 3.0 on a system that old. But you should get decent speeds, at the cost of much higher CPU use than if the drive running on SATA/PATA/IDE/SCSI. Even if you get as much as possible from USB 3.0, its still going to be slightly slower than on SATA (PCI issues aside, see below). Its also going to make the system to be fairly unusable during large read/write/copy operations.

Yeah, just SATA, SiL doesnt make USB controllers as far as I know.

Still congestion problems, as its over the PCI interface and that is limited to 133MB/sec.....not 'per slot' but the overall bus.

PCI was fine when you had ethernet (12.5MB/sec max) a sound card, video card and maybe a PCI IDE/RAID controller. A SATA1 controller alone can use more bandwidth than PCI can supply. Add a USB card to copy to or from, and youre well past 133MB/sec, without even allowing some bandwidth for sound and video.

Umm...what difference does cluster size make? Its a question of 'where are you getting the data'?

The little ol 533 isnt going to crunch any numbers fast enough to output at 100MB/sec, even if you could get the data to the CPU that fast.

If you were copying from the IDE/PATA drive, you'll be lucky to get 50MB/sec on a drive that old, maybe more like 30MB/sec....and thats 'benchmarking' speeds, not 'real world' speeds. Real world, you might get data off a drive that old at 20MB/sec at best, 12.5MB/sec is more reasonable....

*edit- and the IDE/PATA controller on those systems is on the PCI bus anyway.

Lazer printers should work just fine on USB 1.0/1.1.

Flash drives will as well, just they will be pretty slow.

I would NOT be stuffing with that old system. The more you sod around with it, the more likely it will be to just give up. I also wouldnt waste a cent on it, you should be just a LGA 1155 board away from getting your old system going.

If there is one thing worse than 'oh noes! my good computer died' its 'oh noes! I've broken my standby system trying to make it better'.

Sorry, I'd need to do a lot of digging around to figure out if any of them are any good.

Theres a lot of 'old chips' and 'old stock' getting around, and often its the worst of the worst. If I had to pick one of those 3....I dont know. All I know is I'd avoid the 'NEC D720101GJ' (those 'cut on an angle' NEC USB cards I've been around before. I dont know who made them, but I havent seen a good one yet).

I disagree. Its been a long time, but I've seen 70MB/sec+ from RAIDed ATA66/100 IDE/PATA HDDs on PCI with similar CPUs (celeron 300A/366 overclocked to 450/550). A PCI SATA controller should be able to get at least that sort of performance.

I just dont think its worth doing anything to the system.

RAMbus, one of these days you'll get over it jefro . On 400/533MHz FSB P4s, sure, rambus was 'better', but not by much and it was nowhere near worth it.

On P3s, rambus was a joke. Well, it was OKish on i840, but that chipset was about 5 million times more expensive than it should have been, and it was often slower than even the ancient 440BX chipset or 'budget' i815 chipset with SDRAM, and was IMO outclassed by the VIA apollo pro 266 (DDR p3 chipset!, 4GB max RAM where you dont need to sell children to get the RAM in the 1st place).

http://www.anandtech.com/show/703

If it had rambus RAM I'd suggest selling it and buying something more reasonable, the RAM is worth more than the whole system....

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Thanks a lot everyone, your input is much appreciated.

Especially thanks for the warnings against VIA and in favour of NEC and Silicon Image SATA. Not to drag things further, a board with the NEC 720101 chipset has been ordered for £10. This was after following the positive comments about this particular NEC chipset here: