USB 3.0 – Amazing!

Every time I did a full disk backup to a USB 2.0 external hard drive I longed for USB 3.0 which offers a theoretical top transfer speed of 5Gbit/sec. versus USB 2.0's 480Mbit/sec. The other day I was looking at external hard drives on Amazon.com and a Western Digital My Book 1TB USB 3.0 Desktop External Hard Drive with PCIe Adapter Cardfor $100.96 caught my attention. That was just what I needed — a 1TB USB 3.0 external hard drive AND an adapter card. I read the reviews and they were all positive, with a few exceptions so I ordered the package. It arrived this morning and I installed the adapter card and drivers and hooked up the drive.  My immediate perception was that it was amazingly fast but, to test my perception, I ran an unscientific test.  I copied a 375MB folder to a 1.5TB Seagate FreeAgent USB 2.0 external hard drive and to the new Western Digital My Book 1TB USB 3.0 Desktop External Hard Drive with PCIe Adapter Card. The transfer took 1 minute to the USB 2.0 drive and 7 seconds to the USB 3.0 drive! If my math is correct the USB 3.0 drive is about 8.6 times faster than the USB 2.0. I realize that the two drives are from different manufacturers and have different capacities but the fact remains that USB 3.0 is much faster.