BlacX 5G USB 3.0 Update. Fastest USB 3.0 on a Mac

A few months back, I blogged about the BlacX 5G USB 3.0 dock and it being one of the few USB 3.0-SATA dock device to support UASP (USB Attached SCSI Protocol). UASP is a supercharged version of USB 3.0 with an extra boost of turbo. Anandtech noted that the new 2012 Ivy Bridge Macbooks now supports UASP.

With 10.8.2 update, I decided to follow up by seeing if anything has changed using Samsung 830 SSDs.

Today, I tried USB 3.0 booting from an Samsung 830 SSD and I was floored. 12 second cold boot into Mountain Lion. But most importantly, I was getting Thunderbolt speed in the "real world."

Then I ran some benchmarks.
305 MB/s Write on average and 400 MB/s Read.

Thats right. 300/400 MB/s. I still could not believe it so I booted into a few different installs of Mountain Lion 10.8.2. I even tried another Samsung 830. I ran this test 4-5 times with different configuration to see if there wasn't a fluke.


I discounted BlackMagic's speed test and monitored the Disk I/O the Activity Monitor. As you can see, copying and reading 50GB of tests, you can see it reading 400 MB/second. OK, BlackMagic wasn't acting weird.

I then tried my real world test of copying a 30GB Virtual Image .VMDK file.
A 30 GB ( 29.31 GB VMDK to be exact) took 1.33 seconds to copy.

To do the math. It definitely corroborates the benchmark. According to my calculator, it wrote at 300.56048 MB/second in real time. This is not a synthetic benchmark but what you will actually get in the real world.

After reading all of this and you still don't believe me?
I did a video on my iPhone.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaHPh5cKmTI

There you have it. This may be the fastest USB 3.0 to SSD adapter setup on a Mac and even PC (unless you have a new rare Gigabyte motherboard with UASP USB 3.0 controllers). These test were done using the Samsung 830 SSDs.

The Blac X 5G is smoking fast with UASP. It appears to have an ASMedia 1051 controller.