It’s not often we get to take a second look at a product. A few months ago, Brian looked at the NewerTech Voyager S3—his review is here. Recently, a second review sample arrived at my doorstep, so it’s getting another round of testing—this time with an OCZ Vertex 3 will be used.
Because this is a second look, I won’t get into the descriptions or specs of the Voyager S3—those haven’t changed. We’re just going to jump right into testing.
Testing
USB 3.0’s advertised maximum speed is 5.0Gb/s (625MB/s), which sounds quite nice. In practice though, raw throughput is generally somewhere between 3.2 and 4.0Gb/s (400-500MB/s), and due to the nature of controllers, devices, and drivers, that performance is somewhat reduced from there.
To test the Voyager S3, we connected it to the Intel benchmarking system’s USB 3.0 ports and inserted the OCZ Vertex 3 240GB SSD. Results are taken from the SSD plugged into both a SATA 6.0Gb/s port and in the NewerTech Voyager S3.
It looks like the maximum speed for our SSD is about 290MB/s, which translates to about 2.3Gb/s. It’s a little short of the expected (realistic) transfer speeds, but even so it’s easily the fastest USB device I’ve seen.
The NewerTech Voyager’s $35 price tag remains on the low end of the range for USB 3.0 docks, making it an excellent choice for both price and performance. Brian named it an Icrontic Outstanding Product, and I would certainly agree.
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