Everything You Need To Know About USB 3.0

Esther Schindler writes "After a lengthy gestation period, the third generation of the Universal Serial Bus is making its way to the market. USB 3.0, also known as SuperSpeed USB, has throughput of up to 5 gigabits per second. That's even faster than the 3Gb/sec of SATA hard drives and 1Gb/sec of high-end networking in the home. USB 3.0: Everything You Need to Know goes into plenty of the techie details. But is it already obsolete — will LightPeak make USB 3.0 irrelevant?"

Quantum leaps in speed?

[lightspeedius]

So, each USB iteration offers the smallest possible increments in speed?

Cost of USB 3.0 vs lightpeak

[antifoidulus]

One detail missing from the article was the relative costs of the two technologies, with the popularity of net books and the like the cheaper technology will probably come out ahead in the long run.

Sure, it's fast compared to outdated stuff...

[Timothy Brownawell]

SATA is up to 6.0 Gb/s now, and networking is starting to hit 10Gb/s.

Re:hard disk speed

[Anonymous Coward]

I never see my hard disk data rate maxing out my connection speed, so I con't understand why all this emphasis on faster connections.

Have you ever heard of SSDs?

Re:Quantum leaps in speed?

[Sockatume]

That term's annoying because it's trivially true and means nothing. All technological changes are quantised. You don't get a continuous change from the iPod Classic to the iPod Touch, outside of a Cronenberg-and-cheese-sandwich-induced nightmare.

Backward compatibility...

[codewarren]

But with USB 3.0, even though the plug looks the same, the cable has extra wires. Because of this, it will not work in a 2.0 port. The edge of a USB 3.0 plug is colored blue so you know it’s a 3.0.

Fuck the blind!

Network? Home network, listen to me!

[Suki I]

Home network, let me introduce you to your new friend USB 3.0. He is really fast, so I expect the rest of you to keep up! Don't be the bottleneck and you get to stay right where you are instead of being tossed in the bin.

Re:hard disk speed

[Tynin]

The only reason I can see would be if you had an external USB enclosure that housed multiple drives that you plan on RAIDing. With the speeds of SSD drives still ramping up, it is possible you could saturate even USB 3 with just 2 drives.

Re:Micro-USB

[drinkypoo]

Finally? I hope all the companies that implemented that horrible plug will go back to mini-usb. It is as big, by far more robust, you can get cables for it and you are not afraid to plug it in. And plugging in is easier, as the plug will "find" its way in.

You can get a micro-USB cable at any halfway decent camera store. It is not that much more fragile than Mini-USB. They both "find" their way in; I find that most micro-USB connectors are more recessed into the plastic (possibly by specification?) and thus cheap connector edges are less likely to hang up, which IS a real problem (if an exceedingly minor one) with Mini-USB that you don't tend to see with any other variant.

There has never been a worse plug than micro-usb.

Clearly you don't remember PS/2 ports, even though you probably have some in your house. Actually any Mini-DIN is shit. I also have a certain hatred in my heart for RJs, I think they are shit. They are cheap though, so at least THEY have a purpose. The Mini-DIN is just a gigantic failure of imagination.

Re:SuperSpeed USB...

[blahplusplus]

This is why they should just use bandwidth numbers. I never understood why they started language unrelated to the specifications.

Re:hard disk speed

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The one major eSATA issue(I don't know why they overlooked this the first time) is power. For 3.5inch drives, or multi drive external towers/shelves, this doesn't matter at all. An external PSU is a given. For the "single 2.5 inch or smaller in portable case" case, the fact that USB3 delivers the bandwidth(and is backwards compatible right back to the two-1.1-ports stuff that they were shipping in the mid 90s) and the power, while eSATA delivers only the bandwidth, requiring a seperate connector for power, pretty much ruins things. If eSATA had included power from the start, it might have been a much better contender.

As a replacement for SCSI type use cases, of course, USB is a toy and eSATA or SAS is the natural replacement; but for the vast market for flash drives, 2.5 inch externals, and mass-market, works-with-anything 3.5 inch externals, eSATA is doomed compared to USB(especially since a USB port can be used for non storage purposes, while an eSATA port is pretty much storage only. In principle, a high speed serial interconnect like SATA could be used for other stuff; but I've never seen it actually done in practice.

Will LightPeak make USB 3.0 irrelevant?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, of course: It will be as irrelevant as USB2.0 was as soon as FireWire was introduced...

Ohwait...

Re:Proprietary

[JasterBobaMereel]

Before USB

      RS232 - Open standard
      SCSI - Standard - No Pins
      PCI - Standard
      IEEE 1284/Parallel - Standard
      FireWire - When available - Standard - No Pins

Where were all these non-standard proprietary connectors ...?

      And is it just me or are many of these still around because USB2 does not replace them ...and USB 3 won't either ?

       

Re:SuperSpeed USB...

[akirapill]

Reminds me of SCSI, Fast SCSI, Fast-Wide SCSI, Ultra SCSI, Ultra-Wide-Fast SCSI, etc

Re:Sure, it's fast compared to outdated stuff...

[Jesus_666]

Does USB 3 finally have a controller? I mean a real one, not the "let's just offload half our work to the CPU" nonsense USB 1, 1.1 and 2 have. Yes, it's cheap but it's also a recipe for horrible throughput (see FireWire S400 being faster then USB 2.0) and puts an unneccessary burden on the CPU.

I'd like USB better if it wasn't implemented in such a half-assed way. The connectors are horrible (whoever thought that a symmetric-looking but really asymmetric connector was a good idea?), it's incapable of daisy-chaining without hubs, it's strictly host-peripheral and its reliance on the CPU degrades its own performance.


USB is a nice idea but sometimes I wish FireWire had made the cut instead. Apart from the fact that it can DMA wherever it wants it's essentially USB done right. Likewise, I hope that Light Peak makes its way to the market soon as it doesn't seem to share many of USB's shortcomings.

USB is great for HID. Everything else not so much.

Re:SuperSpeed USB...

[jandrese]

Because the marketing people say that numbers are scary.

Re:Sure, it's fast compared to outdated stuff...

[JonJ]

If I had moderator points, I would mod you up. USB for anything else than simple peripherals is a joke.

Re:SuperSpeed USB...

[jandrese]

This is also why monitors come in nice and easily memorable names like WSXGA+ and WQXGA (not to be confused with QWXGA) instead of something scary or potentially useful like 1680x1050.