Slashdot Mirror
USB 2 Devices Not Necessarily High-Speed
mgcsinc writes "Yahoo is running a story on how some manufacturers of "USB 2.0" devices are making hardware compatible with the USB 2.0 standard, but not necessarily its high-speed component." Sounds like the complaint raised earlier this year.
Do the devices need that high-speed component? Does a USB mouse need to be able to transmit data in excess of 400mbit/sec? No?
There's no real false advertising here; just an assumption on the part of consumer.
Should it be necessary that they inform you of the lack of full speed utilization? What if it's faster than USB 1.0 but not FULL speed.
IMO, the only clearcut measure is whether the standard is met, and it seems to be.
The safest way to approach lava is to have another person with you and he goes first.
You mean my "USB 2.0" mouse is not high-speed?
If its compatiable with USB 2.0 ports, but doesn't have the USB 2.0, its called USB 1.1.
For external Drives they sure as hell do. But even then why not just fo Firewire.
This isn't much of a revelation, it just means that the USB connection isn't the bottleneck. ATA133 drives won't run at 133 MB/s, either, I wonder if someone's going to start complaining about that now. ;-)
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
Hi-Speed verses Full Speed. [yawn]
Same fraud.
Different day.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
instead of screaming that you've been screwed, or letting the media scare you into thinking that you didnt get what you thought you were getting ....
Ask yourself why you would want components that dont require super high speed to consume all the super high speed.
I say that at least in some cases, it was good foresight to have some items run at a useful speed that doesnt consume all the bandwidth.
George Bush + Linux = "I will not let information get in the way of the fight against Windows"
Well, many devices do not need the 480Mb/s speed as said in the article however, the devices are backwards compatible.
So why is everyone whining? Just have the anufacturers put max speed transfer on the boxes as spec sheet. Just dont buy anything from those manufacturers who dont.
And as a sideline about the jab about printers not meing "full-speed", who cares? Paralell printers, in epp/ecp mode, could only transfer max 11Mbps. And since consumer printers dont print very fast, what's the big deal? And it it was made to be fast, it'd have a network jack for 100Mbps connectivity.
Dude you have no idea how fast some of us point/scroll/click.
Roommate1: Whoa, what's wrong with Tod? It looks like he's having a seizure or something?
Roommate2: Naw, he's fine, he's just surfing the net after 2 quad-lattes & a couple of red bulls.
What really disturbs me is that USB Forums is able to do the sneaky *rename* of the USB standards under the radar for quite sometime before various sites pick it up. Right now this news is just start to making it on big sites. The manufactures (especially notebooks) are keeping it quiet so they can use the older, slower USB ports but with a new "USB 2.0" name.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
USB2.0 High Speed is advertised (well flash drives anyway) with data transfer rates of "up to" 480Mbits per sec (IIRC 100Mbits=~12MegaBytes), but that refers to read speeds with no other impediments in play.
Try writing large files or a stream of small files to a USB2.0 flash disk. Pretty darn slow!! I haven't done any real measurements so this is subjective. Perhaps I should say DOG SLOW for any scientific method types out there.
This kind of nonsense is the best thing that could happen for 1394. So long as people keep making these excuses and the "USB people" allow this sort of erosion to take place, USB will remain the domain of mice and keyboards and scanners and printers and still cameras.
Wow. You really are as innocent as a lamb aren't you?
Look all around you. Take a very good look. Have a look at that McDonalds' "100% beef" burger that tastes like no other beef on Earth. Watch that WWE wrestling match that's about as honest as a $7 note. Watch that TV expose that shows the truth behind the "honest" business practices of Gap, Nike, etc. Read RIAA's latest claims about P2P costing its members half their sales revenues, and of a 40-speed CD burner equating to 40 actual burners. Pick up a paper and marvel at how many of your fellow citizens still think the attacks on Septemer 11th were carried out by Iraqis, or that WMDs will be found in Iraq any minute now.
The world is full of lies and deception. That isn't about to change. If you're going to stand up and complain about it, you could find a lot of better things to complain about than the possible mis-labelling (deliberate or otherwise) of a USB2 device.
I'm not trying to put you down or anything. I'm just trying to show you that this is a drop in the ocean. And complaining about drops when there are some big, kick-ass tsunamis out there is kind of ridiculous.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
This explains why I receive a warning message saying "Hi-Speed USB 2.0 device plugged into a non Hi-Speed USB 2.0 port." whenever I plug in my fancy new Nomad JukeBox Zen NX. I tried everything: uninstalling and reinstalling the latest drivers, third-party drivers, microsoft's drivers, different ports on the motherboard...nothing would work. Instead, I had to wait many many hours to transfer my music over to my mp3 player. On the website it doesn't make any distinction between Hi-Speed and Full Speed. Maybe I can return it for false advertising?
USB 1.1 Renumbered To USB 2?
Because Apple slaps a royalty fee on every Firewire device made. Something to the order of $1 per unit, or so I heard...
Does this actually surprise anyone? I mean these are the same people who have been decieving consumers for years with hard drive sizes. Do you actually think they're going to tell you the device doesn't work the way it should by labeling it as such? The record industry doesn't label crippled crap. Why should the computer industry? Why do consumers actually trust producers that constantly try to implement new technology that assume that the consumer is the one that can't be trusted? Does it make me angry that the producers keep doing this kind of crap? Yes. Does it surprise me? Not in the least.
If someone buys a USB 2.0 mouse over a USB 1.1 one, they have no right to complain. In fact, what can they complain about? What expectation is being let down? Were they expecting the mouse to be...faster? Can they conceive of a possible usage for a "Hi-Speed" keyboard?
If a consumer just looks at boxes and buys it because "2.0 is higher than 1.1: it must be newer/better," then they deserve what they get. All they have to do is look at the box or ask someone in the department to explain the difference and they'll realize there's no benefit.
I do think it's amoral of companies to do this, the customer isn't losing anything. If it were an external hard drive, they would have a case. If socks were advertized as "hand compatible," would you complain? They can go on your hands, but there wouldn't be much point, nor any difference between them and other socks.
GL
The problem is that the boxes of most boxes are covered with pictures of people oohing and ahhing but don't have much information about what is actually inside the box. Even manuals (if you are lucky enough to get one) are very light on specs.
I see this as one of the more unfortunate side-effects of the mass adoption of computers. Most people will never realize their hardware is crappier than they thought, and the rest of us are told to shut up and be good little consumers. I get my revenge by buying multiple models off the shelf, and returning all but the one that makes the cut.
Mod parent sideways.
Karma is precious.
If it was text, that'd be a lot of paper. I'd sure like to see that...
DROS - Open-Source Robot Software
If you need to attach a device that can use the high speed connection, like a hard drive or an MP3 player or something, then stick with firewire. It's easier to deal with. Of course, USB is fine for your mouse or keyboard or what have you, but trying to sort out the differences there is just too much of a pain. Firewire has various speeds too, but I've yet to see a firewire device that really needs a high speed work at a lower one.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
The computer industry will keep making disceptive ads and lawyers doing class-action suits against them will keep getting rich. My guess is that the computer industry still make more money than they lose to the lawyers, so everyone is better off but the consumer...
Looking for any old 8-bit Heathkit/Zenith software/hardware - http://heathkit.garlanger.com
Disclaimer: This being /. the above is more with regard to cameras external HDDs, and other hardware which would benefit from the higher speed.
The Mothership
Apple seems to imply that they don't charge a fee anymore.
I know they used to charge $1 per port, then they moved to $1 per device, but I don't see anything about fees anymore.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
All it's saying is that mostly only hard drives and burners are using "hi-speed" USB. We all knew that, right? And if we thought that maybe printer and flash memory readers were really using "hi-speed" we at least knew that they couldn't take advantage of the full bandwidth, right? And we all have come to expect manufacturers to lie to us on the packaging, right?
Yes, it is disappointing that companies are using the USB 2.0 hype to sell lower speed products. But what's the big deal?
The only thing that would really piss me off is if the hard drive and cd/dvd-r burners WEREN'T using "hi-speed" USB 2.0. But the article says they are! Or at least it doesn't say they aren't. And that's my second point: The article doesn't really say much of anything. It only puts the question of authenticity in the reader's mind. I think it is a poorly constructed article and not very worthy of Slashdot attention.
I'm not trying to flame or troll. I am just really missing the significance of this article.
The USB2 does not signify high-speed of course. If you want USB High Speed you need to look for the high speed logo.
as in this image here: http://www.usb.org/images/headermain/2logos.gif
The one on the left is the high speed, one on the right is regular speed. Simple eh?
The real challenge is trying to find a firewire device that isn't a digital camcorder or a hard disk. OMG FIREWIRE MOUSE UP THE BUTTHOLE.
Weren't USB 2.0 "highspeed" devices actually the slow ones? So, if you have a slow device, it is highspeed, isn't it?
Or was it Big Speed?
Wait.
USB2.0 Huge Speed. No, that wasn't it
I'm seriously confused.
For example, there exist external hard disks and MP3 players that connect to the computer through USB. These need all the bandwidth that they can get. The more you can transfer, faster it can get done. Moreover, I actually have a USB mouse that doubles as a memory stick reader. Does it need transfer speeds of up to 400mbps? Well, it sure would be a lot faster than this sluggish 10mbps or so.
Recently, I had the opportunity to test out two LaCiE brand external hard disks. One was firewire, the other USB2. They were both tested on the same machine, which was NOT USB2 hi-speed compliant. The result was that the firewire disk was much faster. Now do you see why the devices NEED it?
I do not support the terrorist regime of the US
I do!
...that's really, really tough.
You look at all the reviews and what nvidia claimed was the new 8x version of the 440mx, the 8x version was defined as having a particular mhz for the gpu and memory. You get on pricewatch and look up the specs, which several manufactorers try to hide or obsfuscate, on what's being sold as gf4 440mx 8x cards, the speeds are way down. ATI does it too. Manufactorers should be forced to distinguish the lower clocked stuff that they're putting out and not be able to name it the same as the fully clocked ones. Consumer protection laws should prevent this but apparently they've either found a loophole or no one has called them on it yet.
External CD burners, external 802.11b wireless adapters, bluetooth adapters, ethernet adapters ... all exist with USB and lose a lot of value if they don't perform at the advertised speeds. Some of these products even come with USB PCI cards to make sure..
Not only is FireWire 400 faster than USB 2, but FireWire 800 (IEEE1394b) is even faster than that. Built into new PowerMacs and PowerBooks (except the 12"PB), and available here here here and here (quick Google results).
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Flamebait? It's an obvious joke. Read the context. You mods are mean.
Do the devices need that high-speed component?
If the device is an external hard disc, capacious MP3 player, flash card adapter, CD or DVD drive, then hell yes they need it. If I bought a 512MB pen drive advertised as USB 2.0 and it only accepted data at 12Mbps, then I'd be damned pissed. That would mean that it would take a minimum of 341 seconds to fill even assuming the theoretical maximum transfer rate of 12Mbps with no overhead. That's about six minutes. Real USB 2.0 (480Mbps) would mean that the transfer would take about 8.5 seconds (again, assuming the maximum possible speed).
I've got an Archos Studio 10GB MP3 player. It runs USB 1.1 and it's slow to load up with music. It was also cheap and I was willing to accept slow data transfers for the low price. If I paid for one that was advertised as USB 2.0 and it only accepted data at the slow USB 1.1 transfer rate, I would be damned pissed and probably would return it.
Okay, there are two major 'versions' of USB, and three speeds.
USB 1.1 is the 'old' standard. USB 1.1 defined the 2Mb/s and 12Mb/s speeds ('Low speed' and 'Full speed' respectively.) USB 1.1 devices are fully compatible with USB 2.0 devices, but, of course, can only run at 12Mb/s maximum. Note that hubs that are only USB 1.1 compatible will only allow 12Mb/s maximum through them.
USB 2.0 is the current standard. It is fully compatible with Low and Full speeds, plus adds 480Mb/s 'Hi-Speed'. Any USB 2.0 compatible controllers (computers,) can run any device that supports any of the three speeds. USB 2.0 devices that are 'Hi-Speed' are also supposed to support Full speed for compatibility (For example, that 52x CD-RW drive should support Full speed, but will drop to 4x speed, when connected to a USB 1.1 controller.)
The official 'branding' of devices is that they should *NOT* specify USB 1.1 vs. USB 2.0. They should only say the speed they operate at. So Low or Full speed devices (mice, keyboards, printers, etc,) should have a 'USB' logo, with no version numbers, just the USB logo. 'Hi-Speed' devices (hard drives, CD-ROM drives, camcorders,) are supposed to use the 'USB Hi-Speed' logo, which, again, does not say 'USB 2.0', only adds 'Hi-Speed' to the normal USB logo. Companies that use "USB 2.0" branding to advertise any device are not complying with the USB group's marketing standards.
But, yes, a USB 2.0-compatible device can very well operate at 2Mb/s, or 'Low' speed. A good example is keyboards with built-in hubs. My old keyboard is only USB 1.1, so I can plug in any device I want, but it will run at 'Full' speed (12Mb/s) maximum. Newer keyboards have USB 2.0-compatible hubs, so even though the keyboard itself is 'Low' speed, you can plug in your external HD, and the hard drive will happily run at 480Mb/s to your host computer. (Obviously, you also need a USB 2.0-compliant host controller in your computer.)
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
It is not technically false, but it is intentionally misleading, which is pretty much the same thing everywhere outside of the courts.
I've seen products marked "Full-Speed USB 2.0! USB 2.0 can transfer data at up to 480Mbps..." etc, etc. And of course if you look at the fine print in the specs on the other side, it says their max data transfer rate is 12Mbps. I've bought a few of said products anyway, because they were cheap and shoddy and I was looking for something cheap, but always with a little guilt for contributing to such a bullshit company.
On a side note, does anyone know if this drive actually supports hi-speed USB (ie, anything more than 12Mbps data transfer)? It uses evasive language and descriptions, has a restocking fee for returns, and no tech specs available...
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
Exactly right. About 5 weeks ago I copied a lot of files (more than 40G) from my friend's computer onto my USB 2.0 / Firewire external drive. My friend's machine did not have FW but it did have USB 2.0.
If it wasn't for the USB 2.0 connection on his machine, I might be still there at this place waiting for the files to transfer.
Other options for external USB 2.0 devices are video capture devices. You just can't fit a true DV compliant stream into 11 Mbit without lossy compression (and then it's not DV anymore.) Of course this is where firewire shines as well.
If not, let me fill you in on something.
High-speed is not required in order for a device to be USB 2.0 compliant.
If you want to make sure your device runs at High-speed, make sure it displays the USB High-Speed logo.
If it complies with the USB2.0 protocols, but isn't any faster than 12Mbps ("full-speed"), it's still USB 2.0 and can be branded as such. And therein lies the problem, because companies claim that their slow drives, cameras or whatever are "full-speed" USB 2.0, and extol the virtues and great speed of USB 2.0. They probably can't get sued for this bullshit though, because they didn't technically lie.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
Planned obsolessence was the procedure of making sure technology only lasted so long then HAD to be replaced.
This was a commen practace in the 1970s and 80s. Commodore 1541 for example.
Eventually you had to repair or replace hardware. Thats the idea. An idea stared with a number of design flaws in home computers and solidified by the Atari VCS.... the NEVER replaced never upgraded never broken Atari VCS.
Nintendo continued this by releacing game titles for only the latest Nintendo platforms.
Microsoft by making it difficult to support old Windows versions.
And USB by renaming USB 1.1 to USB 2. So anyone with USB 1.1 would have to upgrade not becouse the hardware actually IS USB 2 but becouse the hardware is labled USB 2.
I'll be getting a USB 2 card becouse I actually do have USB 2 hardware (not hardware remarked USB 2) so this stunt won't impact me.. MUCH...
Becouse I'm only getting it for home. At work I'll still be using USB 1.1 so if I get a USB drive later on down the road I won't know for sure if it will work ok at work or not untill I buy it.
Also I have already invested in a USB 1.1 hub and I'd I know I'll be getting a USB 2 hub for new devices and I would like to not waist plugging USB 1.1 devices into the USB 2 hub when I have ports free on the USB 1.1 hub.
I don't actually exist.
Because the USB 2.0 "mark" being used by many manufacturers was never offically sanctioned by the "committee" they decided to change the tradename rather than simply say "tough luck" So Now pretty much everything is USB 2 [note: not USB 2.0] because even USB 1.1 mice "comply" with the USB spec...backward compatibility and all. So you're suppose to look a the little USB "pluggie thing" Only the ones with the red "Hi-Speed" flag are actual "USB 2.0" devices.
Like was said before, this was a rotten idea from the get-go by the industry board to appease a few vendors "stuck" with large quantity of stock. Basicly, they changed the "standard" even though public preception fully understood it! That's deceptive advertizing at it's finest.
They aren't decieving customers. You're decieving yourself. Once upon a time, computer professionals noticed that 2^10 (1028) was very nearly equal to 1000 and started using the SI prefix "kilo" to mean 1024. That worked well enough for a decade or two because everybody who talked kilobytes knew that the term implied 1024 bytes. But, almost overnight a much more numerous "everybody" bought computers, and the trade computer professionals needed to talk to physicists and engineers and even to ordinary people, most of whom know that a kilometer is 1000 meters and a kilogram is 1000 grams. Then data storage for gigabytes, and even terabytes, became practical, and the storage devices were not constructed on binary trees, which meant that, for many practical purposes, binary arithmetic was less convenient than decimal arithmetic. The result is that today "everybody" does not "know" what a megabyte is. When discussing computer memory, most manufacturers use megabyte to mean 2^20 = 1 048 576 bytes, but the manufacturers of computer storage devices usually use the term to mean 1 000 000 bytes. Some designers of local area networks have used megabit per second to mean 1 048 576 bit/s, but all telecommunications engineers use it to mean 10^6 bit/s. And if two definitions of the megabyte are not enough, a third megabyte of 1 024 000 bytes is the megabyte used to format the familiar 90 mm (3 1/2 inch), "1.44 MB" diskette. The confusion is real, as is the potential for incompatibility in standards and in implemented systems.
So in reality, the HD Manufactureres are the ones that are correct according to the SI standards. It's everybody else that is wrong.
Does one really want their IO channels maxed-out? (at least for locally-connected devices).
If the IO channel is maxed-out, then the channel is being a bottleneck.
If the channel is the bottleneck, then wouldn't you prefer a different channel anyway?
If they did the same with processors a Pentium would be advertised as a Pentium IV because the Pentium IV is backward compatible with the Pentium but can also go faster.
So a Pentium is now a low-speed Pentium IV; a Pentium II a full-speed Pentium IV and a Pentium IV a high-speed Pentium IV**.
They may qualify under the technical standard as USB2.0 but it clearly is labelled as such to deceive the customers into expecting a faster device.
*the fine print says it's a low-speed one.
**I know it is not a perfect analogy given the differences in instruction set but it's good enough to drive the point home, IMO.
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,
Shut up, Tom.
I do!
For a high-speed Pentium you will want a Pentium III. The Pentium 4 is only rated full speed.
"You just can't fit a true DV compliant stream into 11 Mbit without lossy compression (and then it's not DV anymore.)"
DV is a lossy compression scheme unto itself. It starts right off at 4.1.1 and then does a block compression on top of that. Uncompressed 4.4.4 29.97fps video is like 30 megabytes or so per second.
He also wrote:
"Of course this is where firewire shines as well."
Completely agree. Firewire 1 was faster than USB 1, and now FW2 is faster than USB 2. The problem is, FW is seen as the province of Apple and Sony and the Wintel dittoheads don't want to admit that FW is better for highspeed data transfer and spend a few euros and put a superior Apple/Sony technology in their machines, Bog Ferbid. Especially as it took Apple to drag the wintel world into putting USB into Wintel computers by abandoning ADB / SVideo cable on Apple machines - the irony being that USB is an Intel technology...
Innovation in Wintel is almost impossible - they don't have the profit margins on each machine. So you pay the Apple Tax and get the latest trick kit or you pay the MS tax and run with the herd. Now, if Linux had a competent FW2 driver and a vvideo editor equal to FCP and AfterFX, I'd be all over Linux in a NY minute. But the software isn't there, so I'm sitting here on my G4 laptop editing and processing video...
RS
I pray for the day computers disappear.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
This is definitely not anything new. Every one of us used 56k modems for years...and if anyone had my experience, it never transferred over about 40k. I'm not even talking about the fine print that says it will only download at 56k...but it won't even do that!
Does Yahoo just have so much credibility that they run a story so everyone automatically pays attention to it?
I guess it's a good point, but can someone also point out that most 100mbit Ethernet cards don't transfer at 100mbit?
Labeling things that are USB 1.1 as USB 2.0 is a marketing weasle scam allowed by changes to the USB definitions of USB 2.0. Of course things are going to get messy when you let slime do what it wants.
:-)
People are already used to backwards compatability, and it being one way. PS2 can play PS1, but PS1 can't play PS2. Win95 can run win 3.1 programs, but Win 3.1 can't run Win95 programs. So the flimsy excuse that it was done to make people feel they can use the old stuff on the new version is hogwash!
But as the mention that they haven't had many complaints yet, that's a given. How many of the people out there know how fast something is supposed to be, and of those, how many have access to tools that allow them to check a USB devices actual throughput??? Joe Bloe buys new USB 2.0 Thingamagigie, plugs it in, and goes "Oooh! Look at that!" without ever realizing it should be (2x, x13, or even x40) faster than it's going now. To him, the 2 minutes to load the file is normal, it's not like he has something to compare it to, or a speedometer to check it with...
You want to help force marketing to stop doing a used car salesman routing on the public? Then the programmers out there NEED to write a free program (under whatever liscense you like, but open source would be preferable) that will show the throughput speeds of any USB device loaded. Preferably something that sits in the system tray when active.
Those of you who use linux shouldn't flame this suggestion. You can use an open source USB Speedometer just as much as the Windows folks. Even if you only use it to rate the different USB drivers you can find.
If this doesn't get done before I learn how to program it, I'll be very dissapointed in folks here that constantly say how great they are...
Not bad. You've only gotten two so far though, and one of them isn't even a keeper. I'd change lure, spot or maybe even both if I were you.
I would point out, that the great man is not forgotten:
http://www.larry.denenberg.com/Knuth-3-16/
KFG
USB as well as FireWire are still a single set of wires. Unless you use some sort of USB router or multiple controllers, all the devices must share a finite amount of bandwidth based on the ratio of their speeds.
For example: A device running at 2mb speed that sends 500kb in a second uses a full 1/4 of the entire USB bandwidth. This automatically chops the 12mb down to 9mb, and the 480mb down to 360mb. A 12mb device that sends 6mb cuts it in half.
By the time you have a keyboard, mouse, joystick, mp3 player, external drive, and who knows what else sharing the USB connection, you have a lot of things competing for limited bandwidth with the slower devices taking an inordinate share of the pie. This is one of the reasons I like sticking to the old PS/2 style Mouse and keyboard connectors. Keep these usually slow devices from flooding the connection. Particularily the high-res mice.
And then when you consider the 2mb/12mb/480mb numbers are the absolute maximum theoretical numbers without overhead, you realize that you get nowhere near this kind of throughput in the first place. Things can get bogged down pretty quickly.
Personally, I run two separate USB adapters. The built-in USB on the motherboard and a separate PCI USB controller. I leave all the slow things like keyboard and mouse and joysticks on one controller. I put the things that need speed like a dvd burner or mp3 player on the other one and make sure I don't use them at the same time.
Do you know why I was fooled? It was because I had been reading Intel propaganda on USB 2.0 for many months. Every paper on USB 2.0 touted its blazing speed, allegedly making it the equal of Firewire. They didn't say anything about "Low Speed", "Full Speed" and "High Speed". They just said that it was backwards compatible with USB 1.1 and that new hubs were needed for 480 Mbps operation. In my brain, "USB 2.0" was firmly associated with "480 Mbps".
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
USB 2.0 = Iffy development, and I can't boot from the drive.
FireWire 800 (or 400, for that matter) = High-speed components that I can boot from.
The answer = USB 2 blows.
Sorry, but I have a PC. 4 pin firewire built right into my couple year old laptop. I find it much nicer than USB, in general. Have it hooked to a drive bay, an MP3 player, and occasionally to other computers via firewire. Works very well.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
This may be a dumb question, but I remember way back when hearing that "Hi-Speed Devices" will be slowed down to "full speed" when sharing the bus with a "full speed" device.
I think this is where the confusion may come in.
If I have a "USB 2.0" compatible keyboard , I would assume that when I plug in a "Hi-Speed" device to the keyboard, it would run at "Hi-Speed".
As an aside, perhaps someone can explain this to an ignorant Mac user: Macs used to be advertised as having two USB busses where PCs talked about the number of ports. (Yes, Apple now talks about the number of ports as well)
The question I have: How many USB busses does a PC typically have? Because this is potentially very confusing to a customer. I plug my "Hi-Speed" hard drive into a different port than the keyboard, but since it is sharing the bus it runs slowly.
do you really need support for 120 devices?not to mention the overhead usb gobbles up.fuck em.PS/2 forebba!
this isnt unique to the computer industry
When I type on my old USB 1.1 keyboard, it keeps dropping keystrokes whenever I type more than 1.3 million characters a second. Now with my new USB 2.0 keyboard I can safely type at 50 million characters per second without it dropping keystrokes!
All misspellings and grammatical errors in the above post are intentional and part of my artistic expression.
Devices that used the maximum throughput of USB 1.1 were full speed. Devices that utilize the full speed of USB 2 are high speed.
Alas, not so simple.
I recently bought a UBS 2.0 Mouse and I just realized the plug doesn't fit any of my IEEE 1394 ports. Is there some sort of adapter I can make out of paperclips and tinfoil?
This message brought to you by Jack Schitt's Previously Shat Shit
"and spend a few euros and put a superior Apple/Sony technology in their machines"
Both technologies were invented in the good ole' USA (like the Internet), so its more correct to say "Dollars".
You're welcome!
I develop a number of video products for USB 2.0 and previously USB 1.1. I have some experience of driver development but I am technically a hardware engineer with a leaning towards microcontroller development.
Recently I started developing with USB 2.0 assuming that I could get maybe 50MB/sec data through (480Mbps - overhead) the high speed mode of USB 2.0. Note that full speed is lower than high speed in the spec ?!?!?!?
What I found was that on PCI / cardbus plugin cards, this was actually reduced to about 20MB/sec. This is less than half what you seen on product boxes.
The issue is that host controllers are at fault. USB 2.0 contains a number of slots in each frame on the bus that can be filled with data. If I remember correctly, there are 13 available slots for bulk transfers that can take 512 bytes each. Technically, 12 of these shoulb be the theoratical maximum limit to fill. In practice, many controllers only fill 3 giving the poor bandwidth as they cant keep up with the data rate.
The other issue is with the PCI bus. On many computers this is not fast enough to deal with a single device needing high speed bandwidth although in most cases it does not appear to be the bottleneck.
Most add-on USB 2.0 host controller cards contain a chip from one manufacturer (who I choose not to mention). These suffer the worst performance of 18-20 MB/sec. They comply with the Intel EHCI 0.95 spec for host controllers although the manufacturer has offered a new 1.0 compliant chip offering some increases in speed.
The best performance is when USB 2.0 is tapped from Intel North Bridges on the motherboard. 11 of the slots are filled with data and 35MB/sec can be achieved. Its still not the maximum performance though
If you are buying a PC, make sure you insist on built in USB 2.0 or all your devices may run slow. Also make sure you only use the Microsoft drivers on Windows as they offer significant improvements over others. Win XP or Win2K SP4 contain these.
Note that the USB 2.0 and EHCI 1.0 specs do not contain any specification as to the bandwidth a host controller must provide. Some chips may be better or worse than those mentioned above as there is no control on what a manufacturer should provide
If you are cursed with VIA USB 1.1 controlers (UHCI) having slow 2.0 device that will talk to the EHCI par of the controler makes LOTS of sense. The EHCI/OHCI are infinitely smarter and have a much lesser impact on the PCI than UHCI!
So I'd be happy to find a USB 2.0 mouse, if I had a VIA chipset!
Donald Knuth is dead? WTF! Why wasn't I informed?
I was patiently waiting for AOCP part 4...
is this a hoax?
Please answer, anyone!
Well then go download some betas and see if you're good enough to squeeze $2.56 out of him.
KFG
Well, I know that I'm not good enough. So I have to wait until he speaks to me from a burning thornbush. Because the internet and its inhabitants are not very helpful in this case.
I propose a mandatory dead-man-switch for every celebrity, that, in the case of death, posts a detailed message to the fans and releases all works to the public domain.
OTOH, if he really died in 2/2001, maybe we can bury him out and bring him back to live, given the advances the medical sciences made in the last 2.66 years. This is so obvious, I'm sure someone did it already. So he has to be alive, anyway.
"It's not denial. I'm just selective about the reality I accept." -- Calvin
I can understand when occasionally the /. eds accidentally post dupe stories, but when they explicitly point out that it's a dupe in the flipping article I begin to get a bit cross. There is nothing new here - aren't there any interesting stories today that aren't dupes?
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
The article mentions that many devices aren't high-speed capable. I have a ieee1394 CF card reader that in theory can transfer at 400 Mbps, but the CF card seems to be the limiter. I get 42 Mbps with this arrangement, which is satisfactory.
:)
To your point, though, if I were limited to 12 Mbps I'd definitely notice that. I might even be damned pissed.
My HP 7550 printer has a CF card reader, and this is the slowest way I've found to transfer images to a PC. It must implement the low-speed 1.5 Mbps connection.
Remember when they renamed USB 1.1 to USB 2.0, and what had been USB 2.0 (the high speed) was renamed to USB 2.0 HighSpeed?
The bottom line is that to claim USB 2.0 compliance, it doesn't actually have to be USB 2.0 compliant. If that makes any sense. My laptop was made USB 2.0 complaint overnight by that change. I didn't even have to install anything! Wheee! Feel the burn?
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
I bought a sandisk little keychain usb drive, because it costed 60$ with 256mb of ram, and it is supposed to be usb 2.0 hi-speed compatible, as advertised on the box.
I only get 1.5 mb/second from it (12 mbps a.k.a 1.1)
This is fraud, scam, ripoff
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
Let's see what they say about it.
My box of my cruzer mini drive says "hi-speed usb 2.0" and displays the logo "hi-speed certified usb 2.0", so i expect 480mbps from it instead of the lousy 12mbps i am getting.
Yes, i have usb 2.0 ports with their drivers installed, and yes, i have used true 2.0 devices at full speed before on them.
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
Mod parent sideways.
Karma is precious.
The Universe is karma's recycling bin.
Last time I checked, Knuth was still writing books. When did he die? Atleast as of August 29th, 2003 he appears to be still kicking Donald Knuth News
No.
I'm 100% sure that you're 0% right. The USB 2.0 bus will support a mix of 1.1 and 2.0 components just fine, thank you.
Look at them here. The USB High Speed devices have a logo that says "High Speed". In order to use that logo, the device MUST support USB High Speed.
The fact that USB 2.0 supports the two slower speeds doesn't mean that manufacturers are being misleading when they label a mouse as being USB compatible. It doesn't mean that when you put that mouse on your USB 2.0 bus that all of your devices will run at USB Low Speed. All it means is that the USBIF didn't do as robust a job in defining the marketing parameters of the specification.
All in all, there's nothing to see here, move along.
-h-
and having verified on rather expensive test equipment....
100BaseT, one host can put data on the wire at well over 95Mbps... the overhead (inter-frame gap, protocol overhead of ethernet-II or 802.3, and even IP and TCP headers only add up to a small amount of the available time.
So, although TECHNICALLY the 100 refers to the bus bandwidth, not the host to host bandwidht, the practical bandwidht available is so damn close nobody really complains.
It's funny when someone replies and gets the wrong person... lol
;)
;)
No dalnet here bud, try old time webnet, left cuz of the nazi uprising (yes I am the first to mention the word nazi) taking place there. So I found it easier to just get some real friends and run a private network
so go down your list and guess again
I thought the reason for USB 1.1 was to be compatible with USB 2.0. So if you plugged a USB 2.0 device into a USB 1.1 host device (like the memory card reader I have plugged in right now), it'll work just fine....just at lower speeds. So I don't see the problem with somebody making a "USB 2.0" device when it's not really USB 2.0....as long as it works as it is suppose to, who cares.
That is, 1.5mbps devices are not necessarily kicked up to 480mpbs on USB 2.0. 12mbps yes, 1.5, no.
But again, a mouse or keyboard uses so little bandwidth that even when you get done multiplying by 320 it still doesn't add up to too much.
Also, my PC has 5 USB controllers (one 1.1, 4 2.0), so there's plenty of bandwidth to go around as long as I use my ports well.
Honestly, I solve the problem by using FireWire for fast devices. For things I might actually plug and unplug from time to time, the ability of FireWire to daisy-chain is killer.
Shh.... You're going to piss off Intel. Firewire is baaaddd, mmkay, because it doesn't require an overpowered processor on one end to use.
Just to note that you can also do that with USB 2, if you have an isochronous device.
The problem, as I understand it, is finding an isochronous device...
Wow this is surprising to find out
Give the author a computer dictionary, hot plugging. Hot swappable means you won't fry your computer when the power is on and you plug a device in or remove it. I expect there are many devices out there that you still have to reboot after you plug them in (for windows at least), heck, just installing some software does that.
I need to have my 1000hp car to get home quickly to my 200fps game and I can't do well at that unless I have a 400m/bit mouse.
If someone made a USB2 mouse that sampled at the above resolution and sold it for $200 bucks, there would be plenty of people to buy it!
This is my sig.