USB 3.0 Portable HDD - Suggestions

[thewonderer]

Hi,

I'm looking at buying a large portable HDD.  There is a WD 3TB USB elements portable that looks ideal.  I've been reading about USB 3 performance on the rock64 and how there is a JM chipset that gives best performance.

I wanted to ask other users what suggestions / experiences they have with USB 3 drives and throughput / reliability before buying a drive.

My rock64 will be an always on box and a NAS.

Thanks in advance.

[Luke]

Hi, not sure what sort of performance you will get out of that WD drive. I managed to saturate the GbE using a barracuda 2TB drive, with read and write speeds holding stable in the ~90 MB/s region. I wouldn't expect that WD drive to perform quite as well, but then again you should ask yourself if you really need that sort of performance from your NAS on a daily basis. Perhaps the ~65-75MB/s transfer speeds (thats what I get from my regular WB 2.5" drive) will be enough for you and your use-case.

[thewonderer]

Hi, not sure what sort of performance you will get out of that WD drive. I managed to saturate the GbE using a barracuda 2TB drive, with read and write speeds holding stable in the ~90 MB/s region. I wouldn't expect that WD drive to perform quite as well, but then again you should ask yourself if you really need that sort of performance from your NAS on a daily basis. Perhaps the ~65-75MB/s transfer speeds (thats what I get from my regular WB 2.5" drive) will be enough for you and your use-case.

Thanks Luke.

My NAS will be cruising most of the time, just on the odd occasion when I want to copy something to or from it from my QNAP, I just want the performance to be an improvement over my Banana Pi 2 SATA performance of 35MB/s.  Having read some posts about JMicron controllers being the best of Armbian, but wanting to buy an off the shelf 2.5 " USB portable drive rather than separate case and drive, I wanted to be sure they perform well.

PS Not sure whether this should have been posted in the Hardware section of the forum. Happy to move it.

[thewonderer]

Got my rock64 and put xenial minimal arm64 0.6.15 image on it. Mounted a USB 3.0 portable seagate 1.5TB to the usb3 port and tried a copy of a file over to it. Was really dissapointed to see a copy speed of just 27MB/s Disk is already formatted to NTFS and have ntfs-3g installed on it. Any suggestions other than ext4?

thanks.

[Luke]

Please try this image are report back. Also, what OS are you running on your PC ?

[edit] Also see my response here

[GaryLa]

I have a WD "MyBook" which I repartitioned/reformatted with one NTFS partition and one Ext4.

I use ntfs-3g when mounting the NTFS partition so I can change file attributes and to write it from Linux.

No issues, seems to work fine with Debian Minimal and Mate.

[thewonderer]

Good news. I had another go copying and it maxed out at 95Mbps copying. It did drop briefly but that is a great read speed. Write speed needs more testing. So I am still on 0.6.15 xenial arm64. Pc is win10.

I see 0.6.16 has usb3 set to high speed when U-boot is used. Not sure if I am using that on mine. Just standard install with etcher on a micro sd.

[Luke]

Let me just point out one thing. While there are many new thing's in 0.6.X images, 0.5.15 is the release version. So if you just want a working NAS, then please stick to the release image. If you're happy to experiment, test, and offer feedback then use the pre-release images by all means.

[thewonderer]

Understood. I did read ayufan was asking to make 0.6 the new stable in an earlier thread, so giving it a spin. Happy to give feedback on any issues i run in to.