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."

Comments

Re:And how much cpu power is needed at that speed?

[lysergic.acid]

USB is cheaper, and not everyone needs FireWire's level of performance, so USB is more prevalent and dominates the casual computing market; that's only natural. but most motherboards sold these days still come with at least 1 FireWire port.

and while FireWire can technically replace USB, USB will never be able to replace FireWire. even though the average user doesn't need sustained 100MB/sec transfer speeds to transfer their MP3s onto their iPod or text documents onto their thumbdrive, there are a lot of professions where USB just won't cut it. if you're in multimedia production or otherwise need to transfer large amounts of data regularly, then the extra cost of FireWire is more than worth it.

high-end external hard drives, cameras, professional audio equipment, etc. will all continue to use FireWire for this reason. heck, IEEE 1394b is even used by NASA for monitoring launch debris and by the U.S. military in jets like the F-22 and the F-35. so FireWire is far from dead. it's just found its niche. at the very worse, users will have to buy expansion cards to add FireWire S1600/S3200 controllers to their computers. but FireWire will continue to be available for a long, long time.

Apple's decision to remove FireWire from their low-end systems is just a sign that they're no longer catering exclusively to the prosumer/media-production crowd. they're still selling systems with FireWire, but they're also recognize that the Mac-using demographic has changed over the years, and there are a lot of Mac users that will never need FireWire.

Re:What about the rest of us?

[hairyfeet]

Uhh....there is a very good reason why even though Firewire and ESATA are faster that everything will be USB- Because it is cheap and it is the one connector that you KNOW that your customer will have. I tried carrying a Firewire external drive a few years back. I ended up selling it because I almost never got a chance to use it. Every PC I came across, unless it was truly ancient, had at least a USB 1.1 port. If Apple would have given away the Firewire patents for free as Intel did with USB we would all have Firewire ports. But IIRC they wanted $1.00 a port for Firewire compared to $0.0 for USB, and in the cutthroat world of computers it simply wasn't worth it for the manufacturers.

So while it would have been nice if ESATA or Firewire 800 was everywhere, I just don't see that happening. From what I understand USB 3.0 will be backwards compatible with 2.0 which is backwards compatible with 1.1. So that is over a decade that you can be assured that your device will be able to connect with their machine. And that kind of mass penetration is simply worth more to the customers and manufacturers than a speed boost.