USB 3.0 And Very Large HDD's

Saving (almost) all the data on my internal hard disk drives took about 12 hours using USB 2.0 and a WD 1,5 TB external drive. So the time was right to finally turn to USB 3.0. Since I had a free PCI-Express slot I got a LogiLink USB 3.0 2-Port PCI-Express Card for better performance. On my Windows 7 Ultimate 64 Bit I had to install a driver that I chose to download from the LogiLink website instead of using the supplied cd.

My image backups will be saved on a WD My Book Essential 3TB drive. Just make sure to save the WD software stored on the drive before you delete it from the drive - you might need it. Just right clicking the drive in Explorer and reformatting it with Windows tools (and default settings) isn't a wise move because afterwards it might LOOK like it's working alright (including the ability to copy gigabytes of data on it) but I got errors when trying to save an image backup on the drive. Since today I wasn't in the mood for long dives into Windows internals (yesterday I rescued a defect hdd by temporarily exchanging the drives electronics - enough drama ;) I used the supplied WD Quick Formatter.exe software. Right now my first backup on the new drive is running and saving 1,5 TB of data should be finished in about 4 hours time ...

PS: I have been using Outlook, Lightroom and (shortly) Photoshop while the image backup is running in the background; this certainly wouldn't have been a good idea while using my motherboard's internal USB 2.0 controller!

PPS: In total the backup of 1,5 TB of data took 5.5 hours. Not quite as fast as I first estimated but for the first half of the backup I had been using the computer.