USB hardware smackdown — bobbyratliff

Continuing in the vein of my USB 3.0 benchmarks, I’d like to compare the USB 2.0 controller on my Samsung Chronos Series 7 NP700Z3A laptop (purchased in 2012) and my HP Compaq dc7900 CMT desktop (purchased in 2009).

My two flash drives for testing are the SanDisk Cruzer Red and the Kingston DataTraveler 111.

For both machines, I ran Ubuntu 12.04.3 amd64 desktop edition, and used Disk Utility (3.0.2) to perform a read-write benchmark.

Samsung Chronos Series 7 NP700Z3A

Average and maximum read rate for a read-write benchmark on the Samsung laptop
Device and port	Maximum Read Rate (MB/s)	Average Read Rate (MB/s)
Cruzer in USB 2 port	23.1	22.6
DataTraveler in USB 2 port	33.8	30.3

HP Compaq dc7900 CMT

Average and maximum read rate for a read-write benchmark on the HP desktop
Device and port	Maximum Read Rate (MB/s)	Average Read Rate (MB/s)
Cruzer in USB 2 port	24.8	24.3
DataTraveler in USB 2 port	40.5	39.4

My conclusion is that the HP desktop has a faster USB 2 controller than the Samsung by 7 MB/s or so, but this is only evident when comparing performance of the Kingston.