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USB 3.0 Is Ten Times Faster; Get It In 2010
thefickler writes "Seagate and Symwave are jointly demonstrating the first consumer applications of USB 3.0 at CES, showing a Seagate FreeAgent drive running through a Symwave USB 3.0-compatible storage controller device. According to Symwave, this will result in 'speeds previously unattainable with legacy USB technology.' Which means, if you understand PR-write, it will be much faster."
Given that USB is PIO and not DMA, the faster the bus runs the more processor intervention is needed. Given how cheap and fast our processors are, that's not a huge deal, but it's not like a DMA based transfer just got faster, it means that the processor is going to be more busy too.
PR-write or not, it will be a PITA just like USB2.0 until it's built in and common.
Sheldon
Most of the replies so far show a glaring lack of knowledge of what USB3 really is. Honestly, it only bears a passing resemblance to its predecessors, and is a closer relative to PCIe. If you want more technical information, Denali has a good whitepaper (registration required):
http://www.denali.com/en/events/usb3_whitepaper/?EB20090105
I hate to say this, but Firewire's dead. Apple invented it and they've been the main ones pushing it; now that they're pretty clearly planning to get rid of it, there are no major industry players with an interest in its survival. I agree that it's a far superior standard for pushing any meaningful amount of data around, so I'm not at all happy about this state of affairs, but so it goes.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I can confirm it definitely does, but Windows (not sure about other OS's) is a little picky about when it decides to detect if that device has been connected or not.
It's not a major issue, a quick device manager refresh is all you need to do, but it's still an extra step current USB drives don't have.
Of course, it's probably windows' fault more than anything, but still.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
You understand that PIO/DMA transfer modes only meaningful for Parallel ATA devices?
That's the meaning in traditional sense. But you can also use this distinction in a wider sense:
How much of an advantage this is, depends on how complex the initial parameter setup is, how much of the work is done by hardware vs. CPU, transfer speed, how large transferred blocks are, how often transfer occur, etc. etc. Besides overall speed, a big advantage is that the CPU can do other things (like decode a video stream, respond to keyboard / mouse input) while a tranfer continues in the background. This allows a system to feel much more responsive.
You state that USB controllers use DMA, parents says not. I don't know which is true. Perhaps there is DMA support for USB controllers, but the packets are small enough and flowing at a high enough rate that it feels like the CPU is doing all the work?
You'll be glad to know that it does, but I'm not sure if it's enough to run a 3.5" Magnetic Hard drive.
"Maximum bus power is increased to 150mA per unit load (+50% over USB 2.0)."
A solid State drive, on the other hand...
Power is measured in Watts, not Amps. USB3 is still at 5V, but now lets you negotiate up to 1 Amp of current (USB2 limits at 500 mA). So, that's 5 Watts of power. the 150mA draw is the maximum current you are allowed to draw in before negotiating up to verify the host supports more.
Like others have mentioned. eSATA is the annoying spec.
1. eSATA is just like SATA. The OS does like to treat devices as removable. Often resulting is a manual reboot of OS to free drive.
2. The eSATA spec didn't have power on the connector! What were they thinking?
3. The physical connector format is not as robust as the usb. Highly prone to just plain wearing out.
When I first heard about eSATA I was very excited. As firewire already had it's gravestone made. Finally a method of transferring huge files fast from a portal device. Only to find out that it was a pointless useless spec.
If you don't know PR-write, you'll look up that USB2 usually delivers 25MB/sec max, then calculate that ten times faster is 250MB/sec, and then realize that a Seagate FreeAgent drive tops out around 100odd MB/sec being a 1TB SATA drive internally.
thus, you'd guess that it is somewhere between 2 and 4 times as fast.
There has to be at LEAST 76 virgins on slashdot.
This space available.
Esata has two main advantages over interfaces like USB and firewire.
* Fast
* No bridge board needed at the drive end
And several major disadvantages
* Doesn't carry power
* less common than either USB or firewire (and not backwards compatible with either)
* Only one level of port multipliers allowed and some controllers don't even support that.
* While in theory it should be possible to make a wide variety of eSATA devices the only devices on the market seem to be hard drives and optical drives
* Neither eSATA ports nor anything they are backwards compatible with are very common (I think i've seen them once or twice on a desktop and never on a laptop). You can add them easilly enough to a desktop with an adaptor bracket but that means getting permission to open the case and using an adaptor bracket rather than a port intended to be eSATA may cause hotplugging issues.
So I think it's destined to remain a niche interface.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
when USB 3.0 can do 200MB/s (not sustained), FireWire S3200 will have sustained speeds of 400MB/s. and it's not faster external hard drives that will push consumers to upgrade from USB 2.0 to 3.0--current UDMA133 hard drives are already far outstripping the 33MB/s transfer speed USB 2.0 is capable of providing. it's the ever increasing disk sizes, especially in portable media players, along with the proliferation of HD video, hi-res cameras, lossless audio, and other applications exposing consumers to ever-larger file transfers, that will increase demand for faster bus interfaces.
i know you're just trolling, but if every computer at NASA uses USB--whether it's for mouse/keyboard/printer/scanner/whatever--then that clearly means USB isn't going anywhere. i mean, FireWire is a high speed serial bus. of course it's being used as an interconnect--in this case to connect debris-monitoring equipment. what did you expect them to use it as? a CPU? NASA and the military use IEEE 1394b for high-speed interconnects because it's the best solution. IEEE 1394b has been standardized by SAE AS5643 as a data bus network for use in future military & aerospace projects (such as the Orion crew exploration vehicle) that require a high throughput data bus. USB doesn't even come close to the same performance.
yea, you can repeat that as many times as you want, but that won't make it true. FireWire's current applications extend far beyond the DV format. as long as most consumer laptops and computers still support FireWire, it's not considered dead, especially as there are no viable alternatives to FireWire for sustained high speed data transfers.
clueless armchair analysts have been predicting the death of FireWire since USB 2.0 came out. but anyone who's actually worked with both interfaces or is media production (or understands the difference between PIO and DMA) knows that USB's real-world performance doesn't even compare to that of FireWire.
One other problem Firewire had in becoming widespread was that it required a more beefy, dedicated chip. As far as I understand it, Firewire is implemented mostly in the chip, cutting out the CPU, and creates a more-or-less guaranteed bandwidth. This is why it was popular with camcorders - you could always be sure that you could transfer video in realtime. Same for high-end sound equipment.
USB, on the other hand, while it has its own controller chip, is moderated largely by the CPU and memory bus. If the computer is under heavy load, the USB throughput suffers. Peripheral devices are at the mercy of the host to control things. This is fine for things like mice and keyboards, which transfer relatively little data semi-asynchronously. You don't need such a robust high speed bus for such lightweight peripherals. But for hard drives and other devices, USB has some catching up to do.
Royalties aside, the Firewire chipset that could implement a high-speed bus robustly cost more than the more lightweight USB controller. In the particular case of the iPod, a portable device, having the Firewire controller eventually took more board space than Apple was willing to provide. While every computer had a mouse and keyboard, not every computer was made with the ability for connecting external drives. So there, too, the economics played in USB's favor.
When I was young and innocent, I wanted a wife like Marie Curie.
The longer I live, the more I am convinced that most woman demonstrate an almost allergy to technical reasons for things being other than they think they should.
By the way, there was once, about six or seven years ago, an opportunity for the industry to do away with the wires almost entirely for most consumer grade devices.
You probably wouldn't have wanted to use Freescale's UWB for mounting the drive containing your /usr and /home, but it would have been fast enough for watching video in real-time, for moving files between your camera and your laptop, all of that. And it would have been about as secure as wire, as well.
intel and their group have done their best at erasing the history from wikipedia, so, no, you'll never read most of the lurid details.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Since another reply covered the problems with Firewire. I'll also add another problem with eSATA besides large swaths of incompatibility with a diverse range of computers. The connector for eSATA is garbage. It is incredibly weak and unreliable. Using an eSATA plug in a mobile environment is just asking for a disconnection. It can't take any abuse. A USB plug on the other hand will stay connected through a hurricane without any disconnects.
You may like to wait, but FW is deader than a dead thing.
Two things FW gave you that USB didn't when it came to DV. Control of the camera's mechanism (so you could seek for the spot on the tape you wanted to capture from) and isochronous capture so you could be assured of capturing the audio in sync with the video.
Video cameras now are going to card-based storage and video files are just that: files. This means you can access the storage via USB just like it's another external drive and you don't need to be able to control the camera. The ability to grab at file at random means you just copy all the data over, not stream it.
A lot of pro equipment still relies on firewire, but that, too, is changing. It won't change for a while because professionals tend not to change their equipment just because they read about something really cool on Engadget. For the pros, there's FW cards. Audio guys may still need the low latency that FW provides, but that may change with USB3.
Apple was a bit late to the (USB camera interface) party but the release of iMovie 8 (crappy though it was) was a sign - the future is AVCHD files grabbed over USB.
FWIW, I have a FW camera at home, two at work (just bought one 6 months ago), a FW deck at work (the 3 cams and the deck are Sony) and an analog -> digital converter with a FW interface.
I'll keep using FW at work for the foreseeable future because it's solid. And I have all that equipment. My next camera at home, though, will be AVCHD stored on SD cards with a USB interface.
I will lament the passing of FW like I lamented the passing of ADB, SCSI and parallel ports: part "meh" and part "damn, I have to buy new stuff to go with my new stuff".
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
Given that USB 3.0 cables will have fiber optic cable(s) inside them, I don't think Hoi's comment is much of a joke. Be prepared for very expensive super-speed USB 3.0 cables.