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iPhone transfer speeds on USB 3.0

HibyPrime1

Junior Member
TL;DR at bottom.

Out of curiosity and sheer bordem, I ran some tests to see if syncing an iPhone 3GS is any faster when run on a USB 3.0 port vs 2.0. I've seen some tests before where a USB 2.0 device can see small improvements when plugged into a USB 3.0 port, so I thought this was a worthwhile test.

For read speed, I recorded a ~13 minute video with the built in camera on the phone, then transferred it to my pc and recorded the amount of time it took. Then did a simple calculation for the transfer speed (windows wasn't reporting transfer speed for some reason). I did this 5 times on each interface.

For writes, I made a 58 song playlist in iTunes and recorded the time from when I hit the sync button to when it finished syncing. To repeat the test I just deleted the songs off the phone and synced the same playlist again.

Code:
Read speed test: 339,654KB video transfer

1:20.1 4240 KB/s
1:24.2 4034 KB/s
1:15.8 4481 KB/s
1:16.5 4440 KB/s
1:11.4 4757 KB/s
Average on USB 3.0: 4390 KB/s

1:23.1 4087 KB/s
1:23.1 4087 KB/s
1:25.6 3968 KB/s
1:19.1 4262 KB/s
1:15.1 4487 KB/s
Average on USB 2.0: 4178 KB/s

USB 2.0 reads are 5.1% slower

Write speed test: 511,795KB song transfer

2:10.9 3910 KB/s*
1:33.8 5456 KB/s*
1:17.3 6623 KB/s
1:18.2 6545 KB/s
1:14.7 6851 KB/s
1:14.6 6861 KB/s
1:14.6 6861 KB/s
Average on USB 3.0: 6748 KB/s

1:21.6 6272 KB/s
1:17.2 6629 KB/s
1:17.5 6604 KB/s
1:19.1 6740 KB/s
1:18.0 6561 KB/s
Average on USB 2.0: 6561 KB/s

USB 2.0 writes are 2.9% slower

*These two longer times were caused by iTunes not initiating the 
transfer fast enough.  Since it has nothing to do with actual transfer 
speed, I didn't count them in the averages.

Somehow writes are faster than reads, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me, but it's repeatable.

TL;DR: Syncing an iPhone 3GS over USB 3.0 is 2.9% faster than USB 2.0... Which is basically nothing and might even be in the margin of error.
 
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