USB 3 Not working

[DBP]

Anybody can recommend a good tool to test speed disk?
(Instead of doing some manual calculation)
Black Magic speed test is good ?

Black Magic speed test is OK, but not the only tool I would use. It tries to use "incompressible" data to simulate how video data will work on various SSDs. It's really targetted at bandwidths of hundreds of MB/sec (to handle RAW video data streams), so may not be as accurate with piddly little USB sticks.

As well as BM speed test, I use several tools, mostly in Terminal windows.

1. I have Activity Monitor running. Unfortunately the disk activity reported there is the aggregate of all the disks, but it does separate read and write activity which can be useful.
2. I leave iostat -d -w 2 running in a Terminal window (stretched wide on machines with lots of disks). I chose a 2s refresh to be the same as used by Activity Monitor.
   For each disk iostat reports the average block size of transactions, the number of transactions/sec, and the number of MB/sec (the product of the first two numbers). It doesn't separate read/write activity though. It reports the devices as "disk0", "disk1", etc. You can identify which partitions are on which disk by looking at the output of df.
   
   Then you can generate traffic flow (e.g. by copying files in Finder) and watch the resulting numbers:
3. dd bs=32k if=/dev/zero of=/Volumes/USB_STICK/testfile will write 32 kB chunks of zero data to /Volumes/USB_STICK/testfile. On a USB stick you'll probably see these are being consolidated into 128 kB blocks (on good Firewire drives you'll see 512 kB blocks, and on SATA I see up to 1024 kB (1 MB) transactions: this helps as the transactions/sec can be a limiting factor).
   There is a /dev/random, but it runs quite slowly and won't be able to show the limits of the disk. For basic testing I find /dev/zero to be fine.
4. To read from a file you can use dd bs=32k if=/Volumes/USB_STICK/testfile of=/dev/null (or cat /Volumes/USB_STICK/testfile > /dev/null) which reads the file and throws the data away (otherwise the speeds you see during a copy from a disk may be affected by the speed of the disk you're copying the file to).

Hope that helps.

 

[DBP]

It takes 27s for writing 473MB on my JetFlash usb3. = 18MB/s
Slow according to your info.

And my usb2 drives are even slower !! Like 8MB/s
Crazy!!

Before you start blaming the host USB implementation, I would test these devices on other computers. 8 MB/sec writing for a USB2 stick is quite fast when compared to most devices. They're not built for speed. The USB devices I use for speed testing are a combination of hard drives and CompactFlash cards in fast readers. I don't have any USB3 sticks yet, but most of my USB2 sticks are sloooooooow in comparison.

 

[the_gael]

I got the same issue too. Even if I plugin a usb 2 device into the usb 3 port it wont show up. the ports work in windows 8 (dual boot)
Usb 3 is in the device list. I installed the Lacie usb3 driver from multibeast.

View attachment 36688

Im using ML 10.8.2 and MB is a GA-Z77-DS3H

izzysanime - I just read this thread through again and realised that you have installed a kext via Multibeast for USB3.0.
You have a Z77 Ivy Bridge chipset and matching CPU - USB 3.0 on your board is provided via the Z77 chipset and is supported natively by OS X 10.8.2. You should not be installing a kext from Multibeast for USB 3.0 - this might be why you are having problems.

thierry37, have you also installed a kext? your USB 3.0 is provided by the B75 chipset ,whilst similar, I do not know if this is supported by OS x 10.8.2 - maybe thelostswede could clarify

 

[thierry37]

thierry37, have you also installed a kext? your USB 3.0 is provided by the B75 chipset ,whilst similar, I do not know if this is supported by OS x 10.8.2 - maybe thelostswede could clarify

I did not choose any kext for the USB.
See my MB here.
http://www.tonymacx86.com/mountain-...r-multibeast-5-screenshots-11.html#post491681

 

[nguyenmac]

Anybody can recommend a good tool to test speed disk?
(Instead of doing some manual calculation)
Black Magic speed test is good ?


Thanks DBP for the info. I can start looking again into my configs.
It takes 27s for writing 473MB on my JetFlash usb3. = 18MB/s
Slow according to your info.

And my usb2 drives are even slower !! Like 8MB/s
Crazy!!

18MB/s is normal for USB 3.0 Flash drive writing. Writing speed depends on your flash drive. Have you tested reading speed?

 

[thierry37]

I will test all tonight. Read and write. With all my USB drives in all different USB ports.
But I still don't understand why the usb3 port is not giving more speed to the usb3 drive.

 

[nguyenmac]

I will test all tonight. Read and write. With all my USB drives in all different USB ports.
But I still don't understand why the usb3 port is not giving more speed to the usb3 drive.

Because flash drive uses MLC memory, which has low performance compare to SSD, which uses SLC memory. Use an external hard drive or external SSD and you can see the speed of USB3.0

 

[DBP]

I don't have any USB3 sticks, but from these quick tests you can see that this USB2 stick doesn't come close to maxing out the bus.

The USB3 connections were all through a hub. All these numbers were measured with Black Magic Speed Test, and are in MB/s.

	USB2 write	USB2 read	USB3 write	USB3 read
SanDisk Cruzer Switch 8 GB	6	24	5-15	24
SanDisk Extreme 8 GB CompactFlash in Kingston USB2 reader	26	35	27	35
SanDisk Extreme 8 GB CompactFlash in Lexar dual-slot reader	24	35	47	58
Lexar Professional 1000x 32 GB CompactFlash in Lexar dual-slot reader	33	39	84	126
WD 750 GB drive in Seagate GoFlex enclosure	35	37	83	89

 

[thierry37]

I did a bunch of tests yesterday, see below.

I don't have a PC with USB3 port, to test the speed of my flash drive and compare Mac OS vs Windows.
I could not run the Black Magic test on my wife's USB3 external drive (NTFS format)

Comments:
- I don't get a fast write speed on USB3 port with the USB3 flash drive. 16MB/s far from announced 30MB/s.
- I don't get much faster speed with the USB3 external disk (maybe because the 5400rpm is the bottle neck?)
- I learnt that it's not worth saving 5€ to buy the cheap flash drive. It's even slower than my older "good" USB2 flash drive.
- I learnt that USB3 drive is still faster on USB2 port, so there is also no need to save few euros buying USB3 drives.
- I am surprised of low speed from my SD card Extreme. (Compared to DBP previous message)
- I am surprised of the slow write speed on my internal SSD. (or maybe because the test is running from the SSD to the SSD. To see real speed, I should use 2 different SSD?)

Thanks for your comments about these results, your tips and info.

 

[nguyenmac]

Try PXHCD 1.0.11 or other kexts. I can get >50MB/s with USB 3.0 flash drive + USB 3.0 port.