Why Powered USB Is Going to Fail

An anonymous reader writes "Patrick McFarland, famous Free Software Magazine author, has written a two part article about why Powered USB is not taking off at home. (part 2 is also available) He includes a lengthy history on why USB took off in the first place, and then continues on to explain what we gain by allowing Powered USB to power all our devices."

Comments

I agree

[MrNaz]

Agreed.I've never been a big fan of USB. The concept is fantastic, a unified connector that links just about any device to any other and can charge them is a great idea. However I am still bitter the Firewire lost out. It has more bandwidth, has sturdier connectors, and can deliver far more power. Being able to just plug one cable to power and link a hard drive would be great, I have one of those external IDE enclosures, and having *another* power brick is just silly.

Being able to charge high draw devices through Firewire would rock. Powering my laptop from my PC would be great, especially if it will be syncing files at the same time, allowing me to leave the power brick in my laptop case and not have to get it out after getting home.

In my eagerness to get this post in first, I didn't read the article before I started typing. He says it all the same way I would. So to all of you who haven't RTFA'd, do it to find out the rest of this comment's points. Now lets see if I can still get this in first...

Re:I agree

[diablo-d3]

Hi, I'm the guy who wrote the article in question. Yeah, I had laptops-charging-while-syncing in mind as well when I wrote the article, its only a step up from PDAs who charge while syncing (which already is done via normal USB on some PDAs).

I'm a fan of Firewire as well, which is mainly why I wrote this article in the first place. Powered USB handles all the power issues (except for the flaws I noted in my article), and a future USB 3.0 revision will catch USB up to Firewire 800 over 9 pin cables (as opposed to the new over-CAT5 and over-Optical versions that are really for special use applications and completely outside the realm of desktop computing), so I just don't see why they don't clean up Powered USB and either integrate it into USB 3.0, or release it as a more official optional extension.

USB may have killed Firewire, but that doesn't mean USB is ready to replace it quite yet; the fact Firewire 800 was even released, and supported on non-Apple devices pretty much proves that.