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CalDigit AV Drive Review - USB 3.0 comes to the Mac

Let’s face it, we all spend more time at our computers than we want to these days.  With digital camera manufacturers pushing megapixel and file sizes higher and higher, and HD video becoming the norm, we are constantly in need of more hard drives.  On top of a need for reliable storage space I’m always looking for a way to speed up my workflow and hence spend less time in front of the monitor.  A couple of months ago storage solution specialists CalDigit announced a new addition to their external drive lineup, the USB 3.0 packing AV Drive.  On top of this they simultaneously released a Mac compatible PCI USB 3.0 cards as well as an Expresscard USB 3.0 adapter for Mac laptops with expresscard slots.

I have been patiently waiting for the much newer USB 3.0 standard to filter down into the marketplace.  External drive manufacturers are slowly making the switch and mainstream players like LaCie and Western Digital all have USB 3.0 drives available now.  The problem is though that computer manufacturers have so far been much slower in adopting the standard on their desktop and laptop machines.  PC desktop computers is not such a problem as third party PCI cards are available but Apple have yet to integrate USB 3.0 drivers into their operating system or offer the ports on any of their hardware.  Yes even the new $5000 12-core Mac Pro does not come with a USB 3.0 port.  Some say that Apple are waiting for the Light Peak standard to become available, but whilst Light Peak may be the new Firewire, it seems foolish to think that all general computer peripherals will not simply switch from USB 2 to USB 3, as the ports are backwards compatible which is much easier for consumers to deal with.  In which case what are Apple waiting for ?  Only they know.

Understanding the benefits of the USB 3.0 standard to creative professionals, CalDigit did the smart thing and created their own solutions. Mac compatible ports and their own drivers for Mac OSX.  When you are working with digital photos whose file sizes are in the hundreds of megabytes and video files in the tens of gigabytes a faster file transfer speed is always a welcome improvement!

First up I think its important to have a rudimentary understanding of the other interface speeds out there:

What is very important to note here is that these are theoretical values of the standards.  You will NEVER actually be able to achieve these kinds of data transfer speeds BUT it does allow you to get some relative comparison.  In other words USB 3.0 leaves USB 2.0 standing in the dust, and is also considerably faster than eSata and leagues ahead of Firewire 800.  Given that there are also no eSATA ports on any Mac computers, it’s probably fair to say that most creative professionals are using Firewire 800 on their Mac external storage devices at the moment.  Read speed is also always faster than write speeds and even the speed that one Mac transfers through it’s port will be different to that of another Mac model.  Furthermore, because the Mac does not natively include a USB 3.0 port my testing will be done with the Expresscard adapter and so speed will also be limited by the architecture of the Expresscard standard too.  In other words when Apple finally does incorporate USB 3.0 ports natively you will see even greater speeds that those that I can achieve with this setup.

For my comparative testing I used an early 2009 Macbook Pro running OSX 10.6.4 and connecting the AV drive to my Macbook Pro using the CalDigit Expresscard USB 3.0 adapter.  Using a piece of software from AJA I tested the read and write speed of the the CalDigit drive using USB 3, USB 2 and Firewire, and compared it with a few other drives that I already have.  All tests are performed with ONLY the test drive plugged into the computer.  No extra peripherals at all, just the drive and the computer.  One thing that CalDigit claims is that not only does it have the speed of USB 3.0 but it also has much faster Firewire 800 speed than other drives.  Up to a 30% speed increase in fact.  So a comparative firewire test was also of great interest to me because not everybody has USB 3 yet.

When the drive arrived the first thing I noticed was the build of the case itself, very sleek and solidly made aluminum with a heat sinking deign on the side and ventilated front plate.  It certainly looks the part, definitely not your average desktop external drive.  What’s inside is more important though and my drive came with a 32MB cache buffer on a 7200rpm 1GB drive.  Rather than just relying on heat sinks though, the drive also features a temperature controlled fan that ensures it only turns on when it really needs to, keeping things quiet for as long as possible.  Overheating is something that can often lead eventually to drive failure so keeping it cool is a necessity, especially in a drive like this which is designed to be faster than your average USB drive.  During the tests the onboard fan noise was noticeable initially but not to the point of distraction.  I forgot about it almost instantly and then only thought about it again once I had switched the drive off and things got a tiny bit quieter.  Despite having a speedy cooling fan inside, it is obviously nicely damped from vibration and with good quality and quiet bearings.  The AV Drive also mimics the state of your computer so it will sleep or shutdown when your computer does to save power.  The drive ships with a firewire 800 cable whilst the USB 3.0 card ships with a USB 3 cable and all the necessary drivers and software are already on the drive.  A simple interface walks you through initial formatting for use on a Mac or a PC and then installs the Max OSX USB 3.0 card drivers that CalDigit created themselves.

The first part of the test was to run a control test on the internal drive in my computer using the AJA software. The results show a write speed of 72mb/s and a read speed of 71mb/s in its current condition.  These are fairly typical speeds for a 7200 rpm internal drive like the one I am using.  If you have a 5400 rpm drive you might see results in the 55mb/s range.  These results are important to remember because it means that no matter how fast your interface is, it will eventually get bottle necked by speed of the drive in your machine.  An external drive that can read at 150mb/s is useless if it is trying to copy a file to an internal drive that can only write at 73mb/s……. the extra speed is wasted in that situation.

Next up, in order to appreciate the benefits of the USB 3.0 interface, I tested the CalDigit AV drive first connected via the older USB 2.0 standard.

Then I compared this result to a LaCie USB2.0 drive that I also had on my desk.  This drive was a 5400rpm drive and I was curious to see the effect of the reduced spinning speed, compared with the improvements offered by different interfaces, it produced the following results.

To round out the USB 2.0 testing I tested a second LaCie USB 2.0 drive that was a 7200rpm drive as a direct comparison to the AV Drive in USB 2.0 configuration.

Now on to the reason we are here….. USB 3.0 with the CalDigit AV Drive

To test the claims of increased FW800 performance I ran the test again connected via the firewire 800 port on the Mac producing the following results.

Next up I ran the same test on a LaCie Rugged firewire drive that I already had which produced the following results:

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Awesome review about AV Drive. Really educative from all side. Hopefully I can impress my boss. Thanks

Posted by Harson Gibbs  on  05/17  at  12:50 AM

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