I have a WD10EADS in an external WD Bookshelf enclosure that has a USB 2.0 interface. I want to remove the drive and place it in a USB 3.0 enclosure. Will it work? Does the drive firmware make a difference? Has anyone done this yet?
Hi there!!
The firmware of the drive can make them incompatible, you’ll have to make sure the 3.0 enclosure you select will work on the drive.
On the other hand that drive is slow, so it will not get you such a performance boost. Also your computer needs to have USB 3.0 ports to get the USB 3.0 speeds…
Best of luck!
Thank you for the reply, pizzamatrix. I’ll let you know how it goes.
I don’t agree with previous reply. You should see 25 to 30% transfer speed gain on USB 3 enlosures though you use SATA II drive in it. Keep in mind that USB 3 specs are not perfected yet on many interfaces eventhough many manufactures claim they are. So make sure you have a fully tested USB 3 interface in your PC, before make the switch or you will be wasting your money.
Mabkay wrote:
I don’t agree with previous reply. You should see 25 to 30% transfer speed gain on USB 3 enlosures though you use SATA II drive in it
Please read my post, I wrote “it will not get you such a performance boost”. It implies significant improvement.
The 3.0 case will have a more stable bottleneck than a 2.0, true. But considering that a proper USB 3.0 configuration is meant to be up to 10 times faster than USB 2.0 (480 Mb/s vs. 4.8 Gb/s), a “25% to 30% transfer speed gain” is NOT such a performance boost; it remains a marginal boost. Even if it gives you a 100% improvement it will barely reach 960 Mb/s… Just 1/5 of the speed you could get with a proper setup.
That drive is a 5400 RPM SATA II (3 Gb/s), so it is slower than USB 3.0 (4.8 Gb/s). If I were you I’d get a better, faster SATA III (6 Gb/s) drive along with a good USB 3.0 external enclosure that works with SATA III… The USB 3.0 case will then be saturated by the additional 1 Gb/s of the drive, but at least It’ll have a better chance (Not a full chance) to reach its full potential… Which is way better than just a 30% speed boost if pulled out the right way even if it doesn’t reach full speed due to the current implementation limits of USB 3.0.
