Tech on the Go Meets USB 3.0 Performance Kit for Seagate BlackArmor PS-110

Setup and Use
Before you get all excited and plug in your new USB 3.0 Performance kit there is something you should know. You will not have drivers for the NEC USB 3.0 Express card on your system. Seagate also has not included any drivers CD-ROMs in the box. 

Not to worry though, as USB 3.0 is backwards compatible with USB 2.0 you simply need to setup your express card [complete with power connected] and then plug the PS-110 into an open USB 2.0 slot; from there browse to the USB 3.0 PC Card Adapter folder and run the installer.

After that you can move your new USB 3.0 capable drive to the Express card and you are off and running.

BlackArmor backup software
As we have mentioned before, the BlackArmor line of DAS [Direct Attached Storage] will work with an installation of the Seagate Manager. However, as the PS-110 is meant as a more professional backup system Seagate has provided their BlackArmor backup software which is powered by Acronis. As we have covered this software before with our review of the original PS-110 and the WS-110 we will not go into detail about it here.

Performance
As we did with the Original PS-110 we are going to approach the new USB 3.0 Performance kit PS-110 by asking three questions about its performance.
How fast can it transfer data?
How fast can it back up my drives and or data?
How fast and effective are the cleanup tools?

Let’s take a look at each:

How fast can it transfer data?

The old PS-110 shipped with a 5400RPM drive and used a USB 2.0 transfer. For the USB 3.0 PS-110 we need to test how fast it is over both types of connection.  

USB 2.0 –We saw the USB 2.0 PS0-110 reach read speeds of up to 32MB/s. This is not a bad number for a 5400RPM USB drive. With the new USB 3.0 capable PS-110 we see the same performance level.  This was surprising as we expected to see at least a small boost from the 7200RPM drive.

When we connected the USB 3.0 Express card we were very happy to see that the new PS-110 can reach speeds that outperform the internal SATA 3GB/s drive. Our internal 5400RPM Seagate 500GB drive hits speeds of 63.25MB/s with an access time of 18ms. This is 6MB/s slower than the external SATA 1.5GB/s drive; not bad at all.

Our Everest testing backs up what we saw with Sandra 2010.

How fast can it back up my drives and or data?
When using a USB 2.0 connection your backup times are going to be roughly the same as the original PS-110. However with the increased bandwidth of the USB 3.0 transfer you get a nice little boost when running over the express card [or on a USB 3.0 enabled desktop]. Our 70GB back up took only 3 hours and 20 minutes to run. This skimmed roughly 40 minutes off of the original time of just under 4 hours.


How fast and effective are the cleanup tools?
As these tools still need access to the system we did not see an increase in the time it took to run the cleanup tools.  They are still very effective but depending on your system can take some time to complete.

A note on performance
We tested our drive only on our mobile platform. This is a newer system [roughly 1.5 years old], but still only has 5400 RPM drives in it. We have found that the speed of the OS drive does affect the performance of the USB 3.0 PS-110. We also noted an issue with some Belkin USB hubs.  When we had our FSU234 USB 2.0 hub plugged in we found that the PS-110 would drop off when on the express card. Other USB hubs did not have this issue but we saw it repeatedly with the Belkin. We intend to test how well the USB 3.0 Performance Kit PS-110 performs on the desktop shortly. However as there are multiple implementations of USB 3.0 we wanted to ensure we covered them all and we covered them properly.