The main benefit of switching to USB 3.0 in my use case is to achieve higher transfer rates for USB Drives. There are also additional benefits of a higher avaible current at the port (900mA vs 500mA) which would be useful for charging phones and other devices, but was not much of a consideration at the time.
The benchmark shows the the replacement I/O panel works correctly and meets the same performance level as the on-board ports on the Motherboard.
A common tool for testing speeds of disks is CrystalDiskMark, which is used in this test to measure the achieved transfer rate with a USB Drive.
A 100 MiB Sequential/Random Read and Write were performed accross 4 separate USB ports.
- USB 3.0 Motherboard Ports (For baseline 3.0 comparison)
- The original USB 2.0 front panel ports
- Both Left and Right USB 3.0 front panel ports. (Check for major performance differences)
The following chart presents the results of the benchmark.
It can be seen that in Sequential Read modes, USB 3.0 is much faster than USB 2.0, which is an expected result. The modified front panel I/O behaves just as fast as the Motherboard mounted ports.
For Random Reads and Writes we can see little to no performance improvement between USB 2.0 and 3.0 for any of the 4 ports. This is not completely unexpected as the write speeds of Flash memories are much slower to write to than read.
No major performance differences could be noted between the Left and Right ports.