A Late Adopter's Guide To USB 3.0 185
crookedvulture writes "Even with cheap external hard drives, USB 3.0 offers roughly double the real-world transfer rates of old-school USB 2.0. It's no wonder, then, that USB 3.0 ports are available on most new systems. But what if you want to add USB 3.0 to an existing one? This article goes over what's required and explores the sort of performance improvements you can expect to see. Looks like a no-brainer for anyone who does a lot of transfers to external hard drives."
Re:USB3 vs Intel Thunderbolt (Score:2, Informative)
USB will always be implemented simply because it's the natural follow-up to USB2. Just as USB2 all but replaced USB 1 ports (some machines still have USB1 ports for 1 reason only: the chip used supports X number of USB1 ports, and claiming in your advertising that you offer 12 USB ports sounds better than 8).
Thunderbolt - the crappy name chosen after LightPeak stopped dealing with light so much - will simply be offered in addition, especially since high speed Mac peripherals will be the first to jump on that tech and being able to use those on PC as well is a good thing. That's why even now a lot of Windows notebooks have FireWire ports.
Daisy Chaining is cute, but given the hub nature of USB, with a 'USB hub' implemented almost everywhere (keyboards with USB ports on the side, etc.), the practical need for daisy chaining is almost nil.
( There's technical merits outside the scope of this comment. )
I'm not sure why the article mentions external drives so much; eSATA is still a fair bit faster than USB3 for that purpose. eSATA doesn't do much for power over the cable, though, while USB3 -could- directly power some 3.5" HDDs (and easily handle 2.5", just as USB2 can right now, of course).
there is a usb 2.0 to ISA card (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.arstech.com/item-USB-2-0-to-ISA-card-ROHS-usb2isar.html [arstech.com]
there is a Zorro to USB 2.0 card.
http://www.e3b.de/usb/ [e3b.de]
Re:USB3 vs Intel Thunderbolt (Score:2, Informative)
You mean to say "fewer" "cords".
I guess you came up with this number by assuming 24-bit color means each pixel takes up 2^24 bits? That's not how it works. 24-bit color means you have 24 bits per pixel. But you then have to multiply by the screen refresh rate.
Yup (Score:2, Informative)
My wife just brought home a new LaCie external hard drive, we plugged it into my Thinkpad's eSATA port, Linux immediately detected it, and I could access it like any other drive to partition and format it. I saw sustained 100-120 MB/s performance while formatting the 1TB drive.
Re:USB3 vs Intel Thunderbolt (Score:3, Informative)
16,777,216 is the number of possible colors in a 24 bit color space (256 shades = 8 bits, 8 Red + 8 Green+ 8 Blue = 24 bits)
So 24*1920*1080 = 49,766,400 bits, multiply that frame by 60hz and its still 2.985 gigabit per second, and that's assuming no compression