Why is Intel wielding iron-fisted control over Thunderbolt instead of releasing it to the world? We believe the company is trying to fast-track the technology by using a unilateral approach to bypass the usual rule-by-chaos that’s so common to committee-driven standards. Look at Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and even early USB adoption as examples: Incompatibility raged for years. Even so, Thunderbolt isn’t perfect. We could not hot-plug our Thunderbolt device without hardlocking the system. So, epic fail? Not really. USB 3.0 really hasn’t been smooth-as-silk, either. Coaxing the highest performance out of USB 3.0 is not easy. And with more than a half-dozen USB 3.0 host-controller makers, the performance and reliability can be irregular. Even the board we used for our performance tests, Asus’s P8Z77-V Premium, gave us two USB 3.0 controllers, each with its own modes to enhance speed.
Winner: Tie
Let’s be frank: It’s hard to make a definitive judgment about the performance of either the Thunderbolt or USB 3.0 interface based on our speed tests alone because of all the variables inherent to the hardware. Even so, it’s obvious to us that Thunderbolt is wickedly fast. The ATTO benchmark clocked the Promise Pegasus R4 reading files in the 936MB/s range. We could literally copy 16.9GB of files to the R4 configured with SSDs in 23 seconds. Our gut says there’s likely a lot more headroom left in Thunderbolt, too. USB 3.0 didn’t impress us as much. The Startech cabinet was allergic to our OCZ SSDs. Performance wasn’t stellar, but it wasn’t horrible either. USB 3.0’s speed is actually very respectable, but Thunderbolt clearly has the edge in pure performance.
Winner: Thunderbolt
If equipped with the same four 1TB drives, the Startech USB 3.0 RAID Tower would cost about $780 but would let you run the ubiquitous USB 3.0.
Yeah, we know, no one likes a tie, but to recommend one technology over the other at this point would be wrong. If you need performance external storage for video editing, photo editing, or other storage-intensive needs, Thunderbolt rules. It’s over, right? Hands down, performance wins? Not quite. Ubiquity really matters in this world. As we said earlier, the inability to just grab your data and go to work at a friend’s or colleague’s without wondering if Thunderbolt is available is a major ding. Thunderbolt pricing is also at a premium, but really not quite as over-the-top as we expected. We acknowledge that T-bolt has other interesting configurations, but we think its primary purpose today will be for storage.
One thing is clear: The showdown between USB 3.0 vs Thunderbolt isn’t over. And as much as their respective proponents deny that the two interfaces even compete, we think both are headed for a major clash down the road.
| Promise R4 w/4 SSDs in RAID 0 on Thunderbolt | Promise R4 w/4 HDDs in RAID 0 on Thunderbolt | Startech w/4 HDDs in RAID 0 on USB 3.0 | |
| CrystalDiskMark 3.01 Read / Write (MB/s) | 402 / 540 | 357 / 500 | 267 / 247 |
| AJA Video Systems Benchmark Read / Write (MB/s) | 622 / 732 | 508 / 685 | 255 / 227 |
| ATTO Disk Benchmark Read / Write 8MB file (MB/s) | 939 / 831 | 936 / 417 | 265 / 254 |
| Time to write 16.9GB of data (sec) | 23 | 55 | 110 |
Best scores are bolded. Our test system used an Asus P8Z77-V Premium board with a Core i7-3770K, 32GB of DDR3/1600, Windows 7 Professional SP1, on a WD 150GB Raptor. Four 1TB Hitachi HDS72101 HDDs were used to test the Promise R4 and Startech USB 3.0 RAID enclosures. The Promise R4 was also tested with four OCZ 240GB SATA 6Gbs SSDs in RAID 0. File-write performance copied 16.9GB of Steam games from a 26GB RAM Disk with 5GB/s read speeds.
NOTE: This article was taken from the November issue of the magazine.
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