Everything You Need To Know About USB 3.0 322
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?"
Re:SuperSpeed USB... (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is the original nomenclature from USB 1.0 - "full speed" is a whopping 12Mbit/s (vs. "low speed" at 1.5Mb/s). Of course, compared to serial ports that were starting to push 300kbit/s, it was nice. So then USB 2.0 was "high speed" and for 3.0 they needed something "higher" than "high." Pretty stupid, especially when somebody says a USB 2.0 device runs at "full speed" it could simply be MarketSpeak(TM) saying that it won't slow the bus down below 2.0 but the device itself only communicates at 1.1 speeds.
( Oh, BTW, I vote for PlaidSpeed(TM)! )
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Design (Score:2, Interesting)
If you think plain USB is bad, try an eSATAp port. I feel like i'm going to break mine every single time I try to use it :\
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESATAp [wikipedia.org]
But later in the same article (Score:3, Interesting)
On the plus side, you will be able to plug USB 3.0 devices and cables into the USB 2.0 ports on your current computer, but you won’t get the speed advantage.
So one place says it won't work in a 2.0 port, then it says it will .... gah! . . . . . I know they mean (at least, I hope they mean) that you won't get USB3 speeds, but contradictions like this doesn't help the article's credibility
Re:hard disk speed (Score:3, Interesting)
What if you have 2 hard drives connected to a hub?
Backing up from a pen drive to an external drive would I thought be a common use case of bulk data transfer.Or from video camera to my mass storage device.
As soon as you allow hubs and caches and protocol overhead and software inefficiencies then a connection significantly faster than the media makes a lot of sense
Re:Backward compatibility... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not sure I'd trust that article entirely. From TFA:
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..............
On the plus side, you will be able to plug USB 3.0 devices and cables into the USB 2.0 ports on your current computer, but you won’t get the speed advantage.
(my emphasis)
Anyone care to explain this apparent contradiction?
And real world speed vs SATA? (Score:3, Interesting)
USB 2.0 was such a bottleneck that a stopgap was introduced called eSATA, which allowed for external drives that used a SATA hard drive interface. Well, USB 3.0 pretty much that out to pasture
Sure USB 3 might be rated up to 5Gbits/sec, but in a real world test will it actually be faster than SATA? In file copy tets Firewire at 400mbits/sec is 15-50% faster than USB2 at 480mbits/sec
Re:hard disk speed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:hard disk speed (Score:1, Interesting)
Watch your CPU when comparing USB and eSATA/Firewire.
Re:hard disk speed (Score:2, Interesting)
The one major eSATA issue is power.
Yes, power and hot swapping because windoze doesn't recognize the drive as removeable.
While I understand you were going for humor, Windows (at least back to Win2k) will allow hot-swapping an eSATA drive, as long as the controller is using AHCI [wikipedia.org].