Thinkpads Forum

Hey all,

I just received my new T420s (type 4174, 64bit with 8GB ram, Intel 320 SSD with 300 GB) and also bought an USB3 mobile harddrive (LaCie Porsche Design P’9220). I read a review about this mobile dirve with quite impressive transfer rates.

So, I pluged in the drive (in the blue port ) and expected something more than the standard USB2 transfer rate. But that did not happen. I run a test (with ATTO Disk Benchmark) and it reports an average transfer speed of about 30 MB/s (same tool reports a transfer rate of my internal SSD of round about 200 MB/s). After starting the Reneseas monitoring tool (nusb3mon.exe) I had impressive 45 MB/s. I was looking for some new dirvers but there is no one newer than the installed or the one provided by Lenovo on the support page.

Is this the max transfer rate the USB3 port can provide - which is more than poor? Or is there anything wrong?

I was looking around the net and could not find similar problems (with thinkpads). Does anyone has similar problems with the USB3 port?

Steffen

yips ...still not sure bout USB3.0 From LENOVO
(posted one post loooong time ago here) re speeds ...

Glad (Not) that someone else has 'similar' issue .....however lenovo seems to 'imply' that I DID SOMETHING to the USB port OR - the USB flash drive is not USB3.0 (REALLY!!!)

Fact = when I plug that same FLASH DRIVE in a DESKTOP (usb3.0) port(s) ,,,,, the drive ZINGS THRU the same file and near 'specfied speeds of usb3 !!!!!

So .... my guess = LENOVO HARDWARE (if its true usb3.0) DOES NOT COMPLY to TRUE USB3.0 standards and 'defaulting' backwards to USB2.0 - which is the speeds I get when using the same FLASH DRIVE!!

USB3.0 flash drive speeds via desktop =near 100mb/sec or more. I am looking for something near these speeds for "FILE COPY; FILE MOVE" using Win7X64

see if lenovo Europe can give us a better usb3.0 Driver(s) and maybe fix hardware etc etc

Can you post the performance result here? From Lenovo official web site, they did use NEC usb 3.0 chipset.

.

I made some test runs with an USB3 and USB2 mobile drive and on with my internal harddrive (just to ensure that the tool can measure some different values). Unfortunately I have only one external enclosure for USB3, so I cannot do some comparisson.

USB3 results:
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/703/usb3w.png

USB2 results:
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/24/usb2l.png

Internal HDD:
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/62/internalssd.png

I am surprised that there are so less complains about the USB3 transfer speed. There is much to find about the fan noise or the display. But USB3?? Is threre someone out there with a T420s and an USB3 speed of more than this ridiculous results?

fliegengitter wrote:I read a review about this mobile dirve with quite impressive transfer rates.

Could you point me to it? All I seem to find is marketing and theoretical figures.

fliegengitter wrote:Is this the max transfer rate the USB3 port can provide ...?

German c't magazin measured 214 Mbyte per sec. read speed on the USB 3.0 port on a T420s. They tested 6 business notebooks with USB 3.0 ports, and no other notebook in that review had a USB 3.0 port as fast as the T420s. The transfer rate depends on where on the disk you write and read. You would have to make sure that you write and read near the disk's outer edge in order to see maximum speeds. The transfer rate will be limited by the the hard disk's media transfer rate.

At least it turned out that the external drive is too slow.

I went to the dealer where I bought the notebook and let test them both the notebook and the external drive. The notebook's usb3 port transfer rate was about 150 MB/s and the external drive max transfer rate was about 40 MB/s. So what ever I've read about benchmarks for the LaCie drive was not realy what my tests showed.

steffen