Today for review I’ve got an SATA to USB 3.0 adapter from Unitek, it was provided by USBFever.com for our review today. This adapter is like others that utilize USB 2.0 on the market, but this one of course uses the USB 3.0 specification and connection. It’s simple to use, it works and works well… Read on…

Tech Specs,Features or the Basic Info:

Unitek USB 3.0 TO SATA ADAPTER

Product Code#:UFAD001553

Price: US$47.99

Features:

– Supporting USB3.0 specification

– The maximum transmission speed of USB3.0 allows for example 10-30 GBytes of video data to be copied to a 3.5 inch hard disk drive in 1/4 to 1/3 the time compared to the existing USB2.0 interface.

– SuperSpeed (5 Gbps) / high-speed (480 Mbps) / full-speed (12 Mbps)

– Compliant to Universal Serial Bus 3.0 Specification, Revision 1.0

– Compliant to Universal Serial Bus Specification, Revision 2.0

– Mass Storage Class Bulk-Only Transport

– Compliant to Mass Storage Class Bulk-Only Transport, Revision 1.0

– Supports HID Class (option)

– SATA Gen2i (3 Gbps) & Gen1i (1.5 Gbps)

– Compliant to Serial ATA Specification Revision 2.6

– Supports ATA / ATAPI device

– Supports 2TB over HDD

OSs Supported:

– Supports Win 98 / ME / 2000 / XP / VISTA / MAC OS 9.X / 10.X / Linux

Manufacturer:

– Unitek Y-1034

A Better Look at Things:

The adapter comes in a sealed plastic clam shell style package.

Inside you won’t find much, just the adapter and a power supply.

The adapter itself has SATA power and data connections on it, and on the side is the connection for the power.

The adapter seems well made, it’s plastic as one might expect but feels solid.

Installation, Testing and Comparison:

I used the Unitek adapter with both a regular hard drive and with a solid state drive, specifically a Western Digital Caviar Black 750Gb and an OCZ Solid S2 60GB SSD.

I ran both ATTO Disk benchmark and HD Tune Pro.

Here’s the ATTO test on the HDD comparing both USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 connection with the adapter.

As you can see the read and write speeds almost tripled.

Here’s the same tests using the SSD drive:

Here we see the read speeds almost quadrupled when going to USB 3.0, and the write speeds more than tripled.

So now let’s take a look at the HD Tune results, first up this time is the SSD tests:

For USB 2.0 we see an average read speed of 33.33MB/s, while moving to USB 3.0 we see the average jumps to 126.4MB/s.

Then here’s the results using the Western Digital Hard Drive:

Here we see the average read speed goes from 33.2MB/s up to 87.7MB/s. Taking a look at the burst rate though we see a jump from 33.3MB/s up to 113.9MB/s.

So it’s not at all from the speeds we see.

The only issue I have with this product is that the USB 3.0 cable is a bit short, it would be nice if it was longer.

Summary and Comments:

The Unitek SATA to USB 3.0 adapter is simple and very easy to use, truly just plug and play as easy at that.

It works and works well, there’s not much more to say really.

We give the Unitek USB 3.0 TO SATA ADAPTER a 4.5 out of 5 score.

Pros:

+Simple and easy to use

+Works fine

+Decent speeds

Cons:

-Short USB Cable