USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 State of the Ecosystem Review: Where Does 20Gbps USB Stand in 2020?
by Ganesh T S on October 5, 2020 10:30 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- SSDs
- Western Digital
- SanDisk
- ASMedia
- USB 3.2 Gen 2x2
Synthetic Benchmarks - ATTO and CrystalDiskMark
Western Digital claims claims read and write speeds of up to 2000 MBps for both the P50 and the Extreme PRO Portable SSD v2, and these are backed up by the ATTO benchmarks provided below. Unfortunately, these access traces are not very common in real-life scenarios.
| Drive Performance Benchmarks - ATTO |
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On the Haswell testbed, the Extreme PRO v2 hits 1.94 GBps writes, while the P50 manages 1.92 GBps. When connected using the eGFX enclosure to the Thunderbolt 3 port of the Hades Canyon NUC, the writes suffer a significant drop to the 1.4 - 1.5 GBps range, while the drop in the reads is not as drastic - ending up around 1.8 GBps for both of the drives.
CrystalDiskMark, despite being a canned benchmark, provides a better estimate of the performance range with a selected set of numbers. As evident from the screenshot below, the performance can dip to as low as 33 MBps for low-queue depth 4K random reads.
| Drive Performance Benchmarks - CrystalDiskMark |
 |
The sequential reads and writes are more useful from a direct-attached storage viewpoint. Here, we see around 2080 MBps for the Extreme PRO v2, and 2045 MBps for the WD_BLACK P50 as the best-case performance using the Haswell testbed.
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epobirs - Wednesday, October 7, 2020 - link
This was tried and rejected by the world already, under the name SATA Express. A whole generation of motherboards shipped with SATA Express ports but nobody made any drives of any sort to use with the port. (IIRC, WD had a demo at Computex one year.) The closest I ever came to using a SATA Express port for anything was the clever ASrock adapter that let you repurpose the port to create a pair of USB 3.1 ports, Type A and C with 10Gb/s support, that went into a front drive bay.Once NVMe caught on it just didn't make much sense to pursue a direct successor to SATA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SATA_Express
Hrunga_Zmuda - Tuesday, October 13, 2020 - link
Exactly.StormyParis - Monday, October 5, 2020 - link
Performance is one thing, and I understand it's the primary concern in some cases.In most cases though, compatibility not performance is the main issue, and we run into 2 problems:
1- it's hard to know what *should* work. A USB-C port doesn't mean anything at all by itself, there's not even a color code as a quick hint. Any consumer tech that requires to RTFM is failing at a very basic level.
2- even stuff that should work sometimes doesn't. Apparently USB-PD charging on MacBooks works much better on one side than on the other. I've seen a lot of issues with video, even simple storage/LAN stuff.
The goal of USB is laudable. The way they're going at it is laughable.
drexnx - Monday, October 5, 2020 - link
yeah, USB used to mean it just worked, didn't have to think about it or read anything. Literally plug and play.now? no clue, unless the mfg puts iconography to let you know what each port can do.
imaheadcase - Monday, October 5, 2020 - link
Even with speeds it varies so wildly by device its silly. The real only advantage i found with a SSD for portable drive is the size and weight is better. Performance is Meh, because most people aren't using it for own devices so much as plugging it into someone elses. I've seen top selling drives that will barely get usb 2.0, and even then the read/write to usb speed is insanely different between devices.imaheadcase - Monday, October 5, 2020 - link
I forgot to mention that even cables mater so much, i'm not talking about scam monster cable stuff, i'm talking just even same brand to brand, can get a bulk 20 pack of usb-c cables, and each one could be different in speed.BeethovensCat - Monday, October 5, 2020 - link
Agree!! A complete joke! Have Patriot and a Sandisk SSD and they don't work with the same USB C cable. How can USB have come to this?drexnx - Monday, October 5, 2020 - link
this is really getting back to the dark ages of RS232 where there were different baud rates for different peripherals, now that I think about itdontlistentome - Monday, October 5, 2020 - link
I'll bite. Bit of a correction on diagram, more complexity needed.USB 1.0 was 1.5Mbps, USB 1.1 was 12Mbps
repoman27 - Monday, October 5, 2020 - link
Nope. USB 1.0 defined both low-speed 1.5 Mbit/s and full-speed 12 Mbit/s signaling. It just sucked, which is why 1.1 was released to fix a bunch of issues that were encountered in real-world implementations.