Quick SSD on USB performance test

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7 April 2013 Comments

We all heard of SSD advantages. They provide faster transfer rates and much shorter access time than typical hard disk drives. The disadvantage is that they are much more expensive. In this article I'll do a quick performance tests of a SSD disk connected to a computer via USB3 and USB2.

For my tests I used ADATA Premier SP800 32GB SSD, which I placed in LogiLink UA0115 external case that offers USB3 interface. The SSD was then connected to three USB controllers based on different chipsets. One USB2 (Asus N53S) and two USB3 controllers based on Etron EJ168 chipset found on GA-H61MA-D3V motherboard and Asmedia ASM1042 based controller on PCIe card - Media-Tech MT5085.

Adata makes a lot of SSD disks and they are rather positively reviewed. Tested model has a SATA 3 interface - 3 Gb/s which gives 384 megabytes per second. When mounted in the LogiLink case it was ready to work after plugging it into the computer.

Etron USB3 chipsets are rather old stuff and seems to have bad opinion on many hardware forums. They were used on some motherboards and they did make problems. In my case the USB3 works with mass storage devices, and doesn't work with other USB3 devices (machine vision camera, card reader, USB3-HDMI adapter).

Media-Tech MT5085 PCIe controller with the Asmedia chipset is a cheap branded controller that you can easily get. Just mount it in the PCIe slot, connect power (MOLEX) and you are done. For Windows there are additional drivers. The Asmedia chipset seems popular among such external controllers.

Read and write speeds test

Using the disk testing feature in gnome-disk-utility I've tested the SSD performance when connected to each USB controller. The results are as follow:

Write and read speeds of an SSD drive connected to various USB controllers

Those results show how much improvement USB3 gives. The transfer rates are much higer than in USB2, which handled the USB3 device without problems. USB3 controllers where fast, but Etron was fastest, especially with the read speed.

SSD vs HDD

I've did a second test to compare my laptop Seagate ST9500325AS with the SSD on USB2. I used the phoronix-test-suite to execute pts/sqlite test which performs a number of INSERTs to a SQLite database. The HDD needed 2447 seconds, while SSD only 76 - that's 32 times faster. In both cases ext4 partition was used.

RkBlog

Linux and programming, 7 April 2013

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Improving Celeron J1900 gaming performance by connecting external graphics card to PCIe x1 2.0 slot

Low power Bay Trail, Celeron or AMD APU Athlons, Semprons are storming the market allowing users to create quiet or even fanless PCs for multimedia or daily home use. Most of motherboards offer PCIe connect, but as a limited to x4 (AMD) or x1 (Intel) version. We can connect a USB3 or Firewire 800 PCIe controller to it, but can we use an external graphics card to improve the gaming performance of such low power quiet PCs? Can PCIe x1 2.0 can provide enough bandwidth for the GPU to perform at a good or acceptable level? Or maybe can it give some extra features like CUDA cores or multiple display support that can be used to some specific tasks?

In this article I'll test and compare three basic and cheap graphics cards I got from local bidding site quite cheap. Will Celeron J1900 be able to run games faster and what will be the difference between x1 and x16 on a classical motherboard?

Monitoring AMD, Intel and NVIDIA graphics card usage under Linux

Graphics card resource usage monitoring is quite rare. Most desktop widgets and applications will just show CPU and RAM usage. There are however tools that can be used to monitor AMD, NVIDIA and Intel graphics cards under Linux. It can be used for fancy graphics or to locate the weakest chain in the GPU rendering process when trying to determine why some tasks are so slow.

Benchmarking Celeron J1900 on Xubuntu Linux

After building a PC with Celeron J1900 it's time to run some benchmarks. Aside of other Intel CPUs there are AMD competitors like new Sempron and Athlon 25W CPUs with good graphics or the old E-350 still available on the market. Most of them are similarly priced.

To run benchmarks I've used phoronix benchmark tool, as well some bootchart for system boot up time charts and power usage monitor to check how much power the PC is taking.