Does ASRock XFast USB actually improve file transfer?

Since I bought my computer from a friend, I have been using the ASRock XFast USB software. It came with the ASRock motherboard (that is, it's not something that was found on the internet and installed because it seems good) and it claims that it makes the USB data transfer faster then without it (ASRock's page about it even claims that the speed can go up to 5 times higher then with motherboards without this app).

My question is: does XFast USB actually improve file transfer (in the appropriate context, that is, a motherboard that is compatible with it such as mine)?

Searching on the web for benchmarks I found "mixed reviews", usually by people who performed not much trustworthy tests. Some people were saying that it does improve, some were saying that it is crap and some others sad it was good for some operations and bad for others (e.g. USB 3.0 versus 2.0). I'ld like to know what is, after all, the actual worthiness of this software and, therefore, if I should use it or not.

Momergil

Posted 2015-06-21T03:11:14.813

Reputation: 511

Answers

This Anandtech review suggests that it does do something but probably helps more on USB 2 and small files rather than USB 3.

What this suggests to me is that it is essentially a buffer or disk cache layer that can optimise the order that files are written to the device.

That makes sense though. There is no way that the software can make the underlying hardware run faster so the best you can do is buffer the data and write it in a more efficient order. This would improve write speeds exactly in the way Anandtech saw, big writes would be unaffected but clustering the writes of data for small files can improve their speed slightly. The improvement will be somewhat negligible though.

It's the kind of thing that Windows could do but the engineers decided not to and tend to favour reliability over speed, as any data held in any kind of cache is at risk in event of power loss and the best way to protect the majority of the data is to write it all as you get it.

Mokubai

Posted 2015-06-21T03:11:14.813

Reputation: 64 434

So is there any risk to be aware of in having XFast installed, in the event of power loss? Could it result in loss of data? With XFast installed, are there any ways to ensure data transfer is more reliable and minimise the chance of loss? – Hashim – 2016-12-13T10:01:58.547

2@Hashim as mentioned at the end of my answer cached data is always at risk in the event of power loss. If you can't guarantee that the power is going to remain up long enough for a cache to flush itself then you should uninstall the software doing the caching. If your system or power is unreliable enough to be worried about this kind of thing then you have other more serious problems than a disk buffer. – Mokubai – 2016-12-13T10:33:59.443

-1

Xfast copying, corrupted the USB drive making it completely unusable, beware! This happened to more than one drive and I'm uninstalling it.

pcman

Posted 2015-06-21T03:11:14.813

Reputation: 11