Asus Delivers Speed Boost With USB Attached SCSI Protocol 93
MojoKid writes "When USB debuted in 1999, it offered maximum throughput of 12Mb/s. Today, USB 3.0 offers 4.8Gb/s. Interestingly, modern USB 3 controllers use the same Bulk-Only Transport (BOT) protocol that first debuted in 1999. Before the advent of USB 3, relying on BOT made sense. Since hard drives were significantly faster than the USB 2 bus itself, the HDD was always going to be waiting on the host controller. USB 3 changed that. With 4.8Gbits/s of throughput (600MB/s), only the highest-end hardware is capable of saturating the bus. That's exposed some of BOT's weaknesses. UASP, or the USB Attached SCSI Protocol, is designed to fix these limitations, and bring USB 3 fully into the 21st century. It does this by implementing queue functions, reducing command latency, and allowing the device to transfer commands and data independently from each other. Asus is the first manufacturer to have implemented UASP in current generation motherboards and the benchmarks show transfer speeds can be improved significantly."
Re:This will never catch on if... (Score:5, Informative)
It isn't proprietary - it is part of the USB3 spec, but hardware that actually supports it appears to have been missing, until now. There has been a Linux driver for a while now, and TFA says Windows 8 will implement it too.
Re:This will never catch on if... (Score:5, Informative)
USB debuted in 1999?
I had USB in Windows 98.
TFS is just plain wrong. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB [wikipedia.org]...
"The original USB 1.0 specification, which was introduced in January 1996, defined data transfer rates of 1.5 Mbit/s "Low Speed" and 12 Mbit/s "Full Speed". The first widely used version of USB was 1.1, which was released in September 1998. The 12 Mbit/s data rate was intended for higher-speed devices such as disk drives, and the lower 1.5 Mbit/s rate for low data rate devices such as joysticks."
Re:This will never catch on if... (Score:3, Informative)
No, USB 1.0 headers were present on some motherboards in 1996 or so. Practically no device support, barely anyone knew what it was. USB 1.1 debuted in 1998. iMac was the first machine to get rid of the old peripherial ports in favor of USB 1.1, in 1998. It drove great demand for USB devices. USB 2.0 was early 00's stuff.
Re:In other words... (Score:4, Informative)
esata is just sata with some very very minor phys layer changes. its still sata.
and sata is identical to sas at the phy layer (controllers often can be used for both with diff firmware). ide, as we once knew it, morphed into sata and sata and scsi are now 'friends' in a way.
ahci is the 'real' form of sata. old compatible stuff was just that, running ide over over the sata phy layer.
trim exists whether you run esata or local sata. trim does need ahci (ie, true modern sata) but does not care or know if its internal or external.
just to clear that up a little..
Re:This will never catch on if... (Score:4, Informative)
You can only use six non-modifier keys at the same time. This is a problem for playing older multiplayer games. See appendix B.1 of the USB HID 1.1 specification.