All motherboards on the market incorporate USB ports where we can connect all kinds of devices, but these ports are usually far from the user's reach, so almost all PC cases also have USB ports on the front.
But, is performance lost when using these ports to connect USB devices?
The front ports of the PC boxes are much more at hand to be able to connect device like the pendrives and are much easier to put on and take off than a mouse or keyboard, it is for this reason that these are connected at the back.
However, electrically the USB provided by the motherboard at its rear have a more direct connection to it than the front ports, as these have a cable in between that connects to the internal ports of the board, but whose quality It depends on the manufacturer of the box.
Maybe to connect a USB 2.0 or any other device we would not care not to have the maximum speed, but when what we are going to connect is a pendrive or an external hard drive, we do want to be able to have the best possible transfer speed, right? So, do we lose performance if we connect these devices to the front USB of the case?
Let's see a performance test when connecting to the front vs. rear USB.
For this test, a 128 GB Toshiba Transmemory EX-II USB 3.0 pendrive was used, a device whose theoretical speeds are 222 MB / s of reading and 205 MB / s of writing.
The box used is a Corsair Crystal 680X RGB, an undoubted high-end box, and the motherboard is an MSI Z370 Gaming M5, whose USB controller is signed by ASMedia (model ASM3142, USB 3.1 Gen 2).
During the test, the performance difference connecting the USB pendrive at both sites is minimal and practically belongs to the margin of measurement error.
Therefore we can determine that there is no loss of performance when connecting the pendrives to the front or the rear. We must not forget that in the case of devices that have higher energy consumption such as external hard drives, this measurement could change considerably.
At the moment we can be sure that by connecting our pen drives in any port they will have the necessary performance according to the model we have.
