A few months ago I bought a Sandy Bridge Intel
motherboard that has onboard USB 3.0. I
finally decided to try a USB 3.0 SATA dock to take advantage of the USB 3.0
speeds. The results are rather
impressive if you are coming from a USB 2 SATA dock. USB 3 even edges out an eSATA interface.
Using Windows 7 x64 I copied a 16.4gig file from an
internal hard drive to my new USB 3 dock in 173 seconds. The same file using an eSATA dock took 199
seconds and using a USB 2 dock it took a whopping 963 seconds. To say the least
I am happy with the transfer rate that USB 3 provides.
The USB 3 dock is from Rosewill, model RX-DU300. I am using an ASUS P8H67-M EVO
motherboard. This motherboard uses an
ASMEDIA USB 3.0 chipset. Microsoft does
not provide generic USB 3 drivers so you will need to install the drivers that
are specific to your M/B. In my case
it’s the ASmedia drivers which are available on the ASUS site. They are dated 12/29/2010. I was a bit worried when I saw how old they
are but they seem to be working fine.
Watch the video to help show you how to confirm if your USB 3 drivers
are installed.
The dock comes with a 3’ foot USB 3 cable. It’s a bit short in my opinion, but at least
it came with a cable as you do need a special USB 3 cable to take advantage of
the higher speeds that USB 3 provides.
Make sure the cable seats all the way on the back of your
motherboard. On my first attempt the
cable was not in all the way and the speed was degraded.
This dock will fit standard size sata or laptop sata drives.
The dock has a blue LED to indicate
power and blinks when transferring data.
The eject button is hard to depress.
I would also hold the drive during the eject so it does not bounce.
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