Silicon Power Diamond D05

Silicon Power Diamond D05 USB 3.0 External Drive

While convenient, USB 2.0 can be quite unbearable when transferring large amounts of data. USB 2.0 has a theoretical transfer speed of 480 Mbit/s (60MB/s). In practice, USB 2.0 devices often reach a maximum transfer speed of approximately 35MB/s. Therefore, it takes at least a couple of minutes to transfer just 1GB of data using USB 2.0. While this may not seem that much, imagine backing up a main drive which may contain upwards of 100GB of data. With USB 2.0, this can take hours to finish. If you have plan ahead and have a six-pack of beer ready beforehand, the wait may not seem so bad, but most people don't like waiting that long. Till now, eSATA was the preferred option for faster data transfer as it provides performance up to six times of that of USB 2.0, with a theoretical transfer speed of 3 Gbit/s. Though the real performance of eSATA is about half its theoretical limit, it still has a faster rate than USB 2.0. Unfortunately, eSATA never gained as much popularity as USB, and not every system on the market supports the interface. Recently, motherboard manufacturers are embracing the next version of the universal serial bus: USB 3.0.