I was wondering now that USB 3.0 has been out for awhile does it improve FSX load times both in terms of the initial load and subsequent scenery loads while you are in-flight? As an example is it better than a SATA connected disk? What are the drawbacks, if any?

I was wondering now that USB 3.0 has been out for awhile does it improve FSX load times both in terms of the initial load and subsequent scenery loads while you are in-flight? As an example is it better than a SATA connected disk? What are the drawbacks, if any?

Nothing measured, but I owned a SATA external disk, now I got it replaced by USB3, since it died (Seagate).I can sadly say that I'm pretty disappointed with a performance, but since it's only my music drive, I'm living with it.Never tried FSX off of it...

HDDs and SSDs max out at about 150 MBy/Sec sustained (unless run parallel in RAID configuration.) SATA 2 runs at 300 MBy/Sec while SATA 3 runs at 600 MBy/Sec. So you see SATA 3 won't increase your speed because the bottleneck is your HDD or SDD and not the SATA interface..Cheers,- jahman.

I've been running virtual music instruments off of a USB3.0 drive for a while and had good luck with it. Virtual instruments are similar in that they are large files that get streamed in real-time so fast hard drives are critical.I decided to install FSX on my USB3.0 external drive and I have had good luck so far. I also did a test using HD Tach and my average read time is roughly twice what my older 250GB SATA internal drive was. Granted, this drive is getting old by today's standard but I don't know how much faster some of the new hard drives are by comparison. You guys may know better.I've definitely noticed an improvement on my system.

Access time is just slightly worse in the USB 3.0 drive. Quite impressive indeed