Is 6Gbps Just Marketing?

[highmarcs]

I'm putting together an external drive for my laptop and I ran into something that I hope someone can explain to me.

Many of the 2.5" HD's that I look at advertise a SATAIII 6Gbps data flow/transfer rate. I've even found a Vantec HD enclosure that proudly advertises its ability to handle 6Gbps.

The problem is... an external HD is connected with a USB cable and I can't find ANY USB cable that claims it can handle any more than 5Gbps, even the ones that advertise themselves as "high speed".

What's up with this?

Thanks.

 

[Dauntae]

Well the data 2 was half that so not really hype, If plugged into a seta port it would have good speed, The USB is the factor in your case but 6GB speed is becoming the standard on Seta ports.

 

[C0RR0SIVE]

Not a marketing gimmick really if it comes down to the disk being connected straight to the controller, but since you are going to be going over USB instead of eSATA you will see speeds top out around 480Mbps, though, you will see about 300Mbps due to the system bus, unless you of course are lucky enough to have USB 3.0 on your laptop. Even still, the disk will never have a sustained read/write of much over 100MB/s regardless of the interface.

 

[highmarcs]

I guess my question is really, why would they advertise a drive enclosure that's meant to be connected via USB as being capable of 6Gbps, if all USB cables top out at 5Gbps?

 

[C0RR0SIVE]

Because they can?

 

[PP Mguire]

I guess my question is really, why would they advertise a drive enclosure that's meant to be connected via USB as being capable of 6Gbps, if all USB cables top out at 5Gbps?

It's a statement basically saying it supports SATA3 drives. A SATA3 SSD tossed in a USB enclosure can and will cap the whole bus. HDDs don't though.