A-DATA Nobility N002 128GB USB 3.0 + SATA-II Portable HDD

CrystalDiskMark

Version and / or Patch Used: 3.0 Technical Preview
Developer Homepage: http://crystalmark.info
Product Homepage: http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskMark/index-e.html
Download here: http://crystaldew.info/category/software/crystaldiskmark

CrystalDiskMark is a disk benchmark software.

Key Features:-

* Sequential reads/writes
* Random 4KB/512KB reads/writes
* Text copy
* Change dialog design
* internationalization (i18n)

Note: Crystal Disk Mark 3.0 is not available to the public yet, but the Technical Preview does allow us to test 4K performance at queue depths of 4 and 32 in addition to 1. The current release Crystal Disk Mark only shows us QD 1.

The largest difference between SATA II and USB 3.0 is found in the queue depth. Here we see that USB 3.0 does not handle NCQ like SATA does. This shows up noticeably in the 4K QD tests.

The Indilinx Barefoot controller has never shown strong performance when writing at queue depths and it would appear that NCQ has no effect on performance, so the performance is nearly identical between USB 3.0 and SATA II.