USB 3.0's New Jacks and Sockets

The Register has a brief look posted (with photos and diagrams) of "USB 3.0, the upcoming version of the universal add-on standard re-engineered for the HD era, made a small appearance at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES)." The posting explains that USB 3.0 "wasn't demonstrated in operation, but we did get to see what the new connectors look like." How does it handle backward compatibility? The extra pins needed for USB 3.0 "are placed behind the USB 1.1/2.0 ones. USB 3.0 connectors and receptacles will be deeper than the current ones."

Comments

Is it burst speed?

[danomac]

I wonder about the new speed specification... in my experience even with no other devices on the USB bus getting 480mbit was impossible. I always had to resort to firewire for my drive caddy because I got consistent results with it.

I sure hope they've addressed this issue. The OS caching helped, unless you wanted to unplug the damn thing right away - then you had to wait 5 minutes for the cache to flush out.

Re:Is it burst speed?

[zobier]

Really the only way of dealing with this perfectly is making the media impossible to disconnect until the filesystem is dismounted orderly. This can be done with CD and tape drives, but isn't going to work with anything connected to an USB port. It could do if you wanted it to, there's these two little holes on the USB connector that a latch could engage during transfer.

Will it work on Linux?

[Marcion]

Is the software side of USB an open specification or some members only, pass the royalty thing that the open source world will have to take the next ten years reverse engineering?

Then what's the point of SATAII?

[Kickboy12]

Funny how I just upgraded to a new computer that uses SATA 3.0Gb/s. If USB3 is faster than SATAII, then why not just use that for drives? Not that anyone ever really maxes out SATAII to begin with. So it's all kind of useless in the end.

its like DB9 all over again...

[johnrpenner]

the more things change, the more they stay the same -- now
they're back to using 9 pins to implement the spec -- other than
making the connectors physically different so people don't end up
plugging in old RS-422 cables into it -- from the number of actual
pins needed to implement a spec -- we're physically back to using
9 pins that were available in the DB9 form factor, only this connector
is considerably more difficult to manufacture. :-^

A serious question

[moosesocks]

What happened to firewire? All signs point to it going extinct in the very near future....

Wasn't it vastly superior to USB? It had a higher maximum throughput that could almost be realistically achieved, delivered useful amounts of power over the bus, and allowed devices to talk to each other. The audio/video features are pretty nice as well....

Both firewire and usb were well-supported on all platforms, so *that*'s not the issue. It's also robust, to the point of being found in many modern aircraft designs and the space shuttle.

IEEE1394c is even cooler, and uses CAT5e/RJ45 for wiring, allowing for automatic negotiation between other 1394 devices, and normal ethernet devices. Max speed is 800mbps, and it very nicely bridges the gap between "traditional" peripherals, and network-attached devices.

So what happened? Did I miss something? Who killed Firewire?

Re:A serious question

[Lumpy]

Going extinct? huh?? I dont see any pro cameras ditching firewire for usb.

I see sata taking over for external hard drives. I converted all my firewire 800 external drives on my powermac tower to SATA 3 drives last year and gained a crapload of performance at 1/3rd the price. but every HD camcorder that is more than a toy for the masses has firewire on it and will be there forever. Even the hard drive based cameras from panasonic that cost more than most guys' houses still have firewire on them.

Problem is SATA has a failure point. I can have 20 foot firewire cables.. good luck making sata work over 3 feet.

And it doesn't work

[SuperKendall]

I bought a USB OTG external hard drive that is supposed to be able to copy files off a slave device, and a box that is supposed to support two master devices and initiate copies between them - neither work at all with any USB storage I have tried.

USB OTG is a farce.

(o-o-omfg ponies) EXTRA PINS??!?!?

[vectra14]

Too bad they're adding the 5 new pins (given, 1 of them is in theory good old GND but still). As an EE, the one thing I liked about USB over Firewire is its physical simplicity... power, ground, and a differential bus. With 1394c heading towards RJ45 it's like USB and 1394 have traded places in terms of physical convenience (I'm sure a number of people have had the pleasure of dealing with ultra-over-engineered (and consequently overpriced) 1394a/b cables and repeaters.. oh the repeaters).

..Not like the host-heavy USB stack made it a much-liked protocol for me in the first place.

But...

[Junta]

syncing every few seconds isn't the good 'fix'. Using mount -o sync on obviously transient mounts would be the 'fix' to the problem described. If you sync ever so often, there *still* is no good way to track it/indicate it, while the fs being mounted with sync means the file write operation itself can be tracked more accurately.

Of course, the line to draw at what is 'obviously' transient may be hard, but I think 4GB and under and USB connected is a good rule of thumb today of transient sticks vs. persistantly attached usb storage. When you get into the realm of 'guessing' the intent of the user implicitly, things get hairy.