USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 State of the Ecosystem Review: Where Does 20Gbps USB Stand in 2020?
by Ganesh T S on October 5, 2020 10:30 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- SSDs
- Western Digital
- SanDisk
- ASMedia
- USB 3.2 Gen 2x2
Synthetic Benchmarks - ATTO and CrystalDiskMark
Western Digital claims claims read and write speeds of up to 2000 MBps for both the P50 and the Extreme PRO Portable SSD v2, and these are backed up by the ATTO benchmarks provided below. Unfortunately, these access traces are not very common in real-life scenarios.
| Drive Performance Benchmarks - ATTO |
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On the Haswell testbed, the Extreme PRO v2 hits 1.94 GBps writes, while the P50 manages 1.92 GBps. When connected using the eGFX enclosure to the Thunderbolt 3 port of the Hades Canyon NUC, the writes suffer a significant drop to the 1.4 - 1.5 GBps range, while the drop in the reads is not as drastic - ending up around 1.8 GBps for both of the drives.
CrystalDiskMark, despite being a canned benchmark, provides a better estimate of the performance range with a selected set of numbers. As evident from the screenshot below, the performance can dip to as low as 33 MBps for low-queue depth 4K random reads.
| Drive Performance Benchmarks - CrystalDiskMark |
 |
The sequential reads and writes are more useful from a direct-attached storage viewpoint. Here, we see around 2080 MBps for the Extreme PRO v2, and 2045 MBps for the WD_BLACK P50 as the best-case performance using the Haswell testbed.
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vol.2 - Monday, October 5, 2020 - link
So wait for USB4 devices then?
boredsysadmin - Monday, October 5, 2020 - link
No, USB 3.3 Rev 2 Gen 5 10.13 Finalvol.2 - Monday, October 5, 2020 - link
So USB4 will be gimped to 10gb rates for USB4 devices? Regardless, what makes you say 3.3, etc?magreen - Monday, October 5, 2020 - link
He's joking. Poking fun at the ridiculous (re)naming conventions of the USB-IFGuspaz - Monday, October 5, 2020 - link
It's like they're determined to intentionally come up with the most obtuse and confusing naming conventions possible. Which is how you end up with a situation where USB 3.0 == USB 3.1 Gen 1 == USB 3.2 Gen 1x1 == SuperSpeed USB 5Gbps, because having four different names for exactly the same thing is obviously the right approach.BikeDude - Tuesday, October 6, 2020 - link
Screw you guys.I'm sticking with USB _Full_ Speed. That is the fastest of them all. Full speed ahead!
Oh...wait...
Alistair - Tuesday, March 23, 2021 - link
it's a year later, and I'm still laughing so hard at this thread :)throAU - Sunday, October 11, 2020 - link
This is no accident. The USB consortium is run by PC vendors who want to be able to call their crappy old widget from last year USB 3.2 without any hardware change, and hide the fact that it is old and slow in the fine print.throAU - Sunday, October 11, 2020 - link
USB 4.1 Gen 1 will probably still be 5 gigabitHuzzam - Wednesday, October 14, 2020 - link
no way man, i'm sticking with USB 3.3. Rev 2 Gen 5 10.12 beta... so called "final" causes covid and gayness, one of which is really bad