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USB 3.0 for Mac benchmarks and review

by Dave Caolo Dec 20th 2010 at 1:15PM

Don't let Apple's lack of USB 3.0 support get you down. LaCie has you covered with the 2big USB 3.0 RAID drive, and Engadget has run benchmarks on it.

The gang used a "relatively new" Mac Pro with the following specs:

  • Apple Mac Pro (2009)
  • 2.66GHz quad-core Intel Xeon 'Nehalem' CPU
  • 6GB (2 x 3GB) DDR3-1066 ECC memory
  • NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 (512MB) GPU
  • 18x SuperDrive
  • Mac OS X 10.6.5
  • Bluetooth 2.1+EDR
  • LaCie USB 3.0 PCIe expansion card
In addition, they used a 2big USB 3.0 drive, a 500GB Iomega Skin (for USB 2.0 work), a 500GB Seagate FreeAgent Go FW (for FireWire 800) and a 160GB G-Technology Combo (for FireWire 400 performance testing). Finally, a series of nested folders and various files, (big, small and plentiful) set the stage. Here's what happened.

In the write test, the 2big clearly out performed its peers. It was twice as fast when transferring the smaller files, and 33% faster than its older brother, USB 2.0, when transferring a 9.4 GB file.

The story was similar with Engadget's read test. The 2big managed 45MB/sec - 61MB/sec, compared to 29MB/sec -37MB/sec from USB 2.0.

There's much more to read, and we suggest checking out Engadget's article in full. The LaCie solution is quite appealing. You listening, Apple?


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