Performance - Storage USB 3.0 - SATA3
USB 3.0
Below, you are looking at a Plextor EX1 USB 3.1 Gen 2 (review here) flash drive with today's tested platform. It is one of the faster sticks available on the market and makes USB 2.0 at 25~30 MB/sec look rather pale in comparison. That is the maximum performance for the USB stick right there.
Sandy bridge platforms at the time offered USB 3 often though a 3rd party provider (extra controller chip). As you can see, the mainboard link is limited at 250 MB/s, that's still not bad for something 2011.
SATA 6 Gbps performance
Below, we show SATA3 6 Gbps (BIOS at AHCI mode) performance with a SATA3 SSD (Crucial MX500 1TB). Here we are using a SATA3 connection directly to the processor.
And yeah, I wasn't sure of it, but we already had SATA3 in 2011 (!), and we've still not moved towards SATA4 somehow.
The SATA3 based SSD is connected to the SATA3 (6Gbps) chipset controller. AHCI mode is enabled in the BIOS, especially with SSDs that helps a little on peak performance. These native SATA3 (6 Gbps controllers) from both AMD and Intel are the fastest your money can get you really. Some motherboard partners will add 3rd party SATA3 controllers which often are a little limited in performance overall. Still, you'd see 300 to 400 MB/sec on such ports, plenty for an average SSD, HDD or optical unit of course. Obviously, standards like NVMe / M2 / U2 did not even exist back in the days.
