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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.
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?
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.
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
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.
Mod parent sideways.
Karma is precious.
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
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?
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.
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.
"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.
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.