I recently bought a new OWC USB 3.1 Gen 1/3.0 enclosure that came with one of their cables with a choke at either end, and I decided to do some testing. (Aside from being ugly and clunky...totally unaesthetic, those cables actually take up as much space or more than the enclosures with which they come.
)
Using an old OWC cable without chokes, the new OWC cable, and a "SuperSpeed" StarTech cable without chokes, I dragged and dropped my 131.99 iTunes folder from my internal SSD to my external SSD and back, with these results:
OWC/24.5": HD2 (internal) -> HD2a (external): 131.99 GB/5:24 = 3.26Gbps
                   HD2a -> HD2: 131.99 GB/4:56 = 3.57Gbps
OWC/19.5" (Chokes): HD2 -> HD2a: 131.99 GB/5:11 = 3.40Gbps
                                 HD2a -> HD2: 131.99 GB/4.56 = 3.57Gbps
StarTech/12": HD2 -> HD2a: 131.99 GB/5:04 = 3.47Gbps
                      HD2a -> HD2: 131.99 GB/4:56 = 3.57Gbps
As you can see, my write (correct term?) speed varied by up to 6%, but to my surprise, my read (?) speeds were identical, not just to the rounded Gbps, but to the
second.
I guess the static read speed has got something to do with a bottleneck in the hardware at one end of the cable or the other, but since my MBP's USB 3.0/3.1 Gen 1 supports up to 5 Gbps, I'm wondering why it's stuck at 3.57 Gbps?
Thanks.
