I've noticed that transfers between USB 2.0 drives are usually very slow. From what I understand, this is because all USB 2.0 devices connected to the same USB 2.0-host share the same 480Mb/s of bandwidth.
Is it possible to speed this up by using USB 3.0, ie connecting both drives to a USB 3.0 controller (like a USB 3.0 ExpressCard adapter)?
In other words, do USB2 devices get the full, unshared bandwidth each on a USB3 host?
Best Answer
According to the USB3 specification from here, USB2 functionality on USB3 hosts/hubs does not change. Therefore, (putting power issues aside) USB2 devices still operate with a broadcast method, meaning it will share the same old USB speed bandwidth with all other USB2 devices on the same host/hub. USB2 devices will not have USB3 capacity available to it, as the SuperSpeed USB3 capacity is on different wires that are not connected to USB2 devices.
Also, keep in mind each USB port may or may not be it's own host, depending on the hardware manufacturer. Sometimes they will have one host for each port, and sometimes one host will manage multiple ports. To find out for sure which hosts manage which devices, open up Device Manager, and click View -> Devices By Connection. Open up the "ACPI" devices, and then there should be a PCI Bus device under that. All of the USB Host Controllers should be under there. Try plugging the device(s) into different ports and see which Host Controller it appears in. Sometimes a Host Controller won't appear until there is something plugged into it.
USB3 SuperSpeed device's data transfers should work parallel to a USB2 device as it uses a different set of wires, and likely would not conflict or slow down any USB2 devices also working off of the same Hub/Host aside from maybe a little handshake talk when the device is first plugged in.