I had bought a new Seagate 2TB USB3.0 disk and gave it a spin. Here's some results that I wrote at the time; and some updates.
USB2.0 is mostly limited to around 20-25MB second, depending on your controller. Remember, if you want network speeds over 10MB/sec you will have
So, it would be pretty clear that the days of 100 MBit networks are over. To accommodate these now ubiqous technologies as RAID, SSD and USB3, I expect gigabit switches to sell good the coming year.
Update:
Added one Kingston 120 GB SSD SATA3.0 drive.
From the USB3.0 to the new SATA3.0, I achieved around 310 MB per second accoring to the Resource Monitor, but the file dialog claimed substantially less.
One of the reasons I had to get the new SSD was ofcourse that the 3 year old 80 GB Intel drive was full, as it is the main system drive, so I have had no SSD to actually put stuff I use. The first thing I did was to move everything Java-related onto the new disk: JRE, JDK, Eclipse and the Android SDK. I noticed an immidiate 2x speedup, and before this, the software was located on the RAID0 drive in this test'
Also 'added' was a 4 GB ' AMD Radeon RAM disk'. This disk is used for Chrome and Windows temporary files. The disk is loaded very early in the boot sequence, and can probably host more interesting things.
Using a single test file of ~4 GB, except for when testing the 4 GB RAM disk, I used a 2.3 GB file.
These values are the observed max values under the Windows transfer dialog.
RAID0 2x3Gbit to USB3: 150MB/sec
USB to RAID0 2x3Gbit: 190MB/sec
SSD SATA2 to USB3: 180MB/sec
USB3 to SSD SATA2: 190MB/sec
SSD SATA2 to RAID0 2x3Gbit: 225MB/sec
RAID0 2x3Gbit to SSD SATA2: 135MB/sec
USB3 to SSD SATA3: 210MB/sec
SSD SATA3 to USB3: 215MB/sec
SSD SATA3 to SSD SATA 2: 266MB/sec
SSD SATA2 to SSD SATA 3: 180MB/sec
SSD SATA3 to RAMDISK: 506MB/sec <--- font="">
SSD SATA2 to RAMDISK: 220MB/sec
The Kingston SSD packaging claimed max 450 read speed, so caching probably caused those 506 :)
