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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."
eSATA is great for external drives that stay connected and turned on. But for removable (i.e. flash) drives they can be a pain. Every time you pop a card in or out and then reboot the BIOS makes you redefine Boot Order, eSATA drives are just like regular SATA drives, not a "removable device".
As a photographer who unloads about 20-30GB of raw files every week from CF cards in multiple readers, I'm pretty excited about USB 3.0.
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Honestly, I think even some of the geekiest computer users start to not care when bombarded with all this nonsense. Ultimately it's a cable -- we want it to be universal, and fast. Nothing complicated there. Sadly the USB standard seemed to gain the most traction in the market despite it's fractured flavors/versions.
So if it ends up being eSATA, Firewire, or USB 3.0 or something else, I hope they just make it simple and fast. It's a cable - it shouldn't have compatibility problems or be used to confuse users with marketroid speak.
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From my perspective, the biggest annoyance about USB 2 is that you can't power a 3.5" disk from it.
So, roughly double the power that 2 has would be useful.
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...
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Fantastic link, thanks.
Given that ExpressCard already has both PCIe and USB connectors, and that the spec you linked states,
Both the SuperSpeed USB and the PCIe specifications, therefore, are derived from the basic
OSI layered architecture. Both protocols look very similar in terms of layer architecture, and their physical layers share many common functions,
as well as similar concepts for other layers.
it'll be interesting to see if the confluence comes to a head and the two specs gain some kind of genuine interoperability. Afaik the current ExpressCard implementation works by having two sets of connectors; if USB 3.0 really is PCIe dervied, it would be great to collapse it to using the same PCIe interfaces.
The other two outstanding questions I have are:
1) how much the new architecture will alleviate latency?
2) is the time quantization better than the old 1ms standard?
Both of these prevent USB from being usable in real time contexts, contrary to evidence of the massive number of craptacular web cams sold.
Gee, don't say that to the aviation industry - they've standardized on Firewire because it saves weight in cabling.
The F-22 Raptor, the A380 Airbus, etc use firewire and gigabit ethernet to save weight. With over 300 miles of wiring an each A380, cutting the weight even in half makes a big difference with an A380.
http://74.125.77.132/search?q=cache:L96bOxSv3V8J:www.critical-embedded-systems.com/meecc/2005/presentations/Keller.pdf+army+tank+firewire+combat+electronics&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=6&gl=ca&client=firefox-a " JSF Avionics snapshot
Distributed avionics: display- management computers, integrated core processing, and flight subsystems
IEEE 1394 FireWire network links core processor and display processors
Fibre Channel links core processor modules and sensor subsystems "
The military will be saying "You can have my Firewire when you pry it from my cold, dead hands." They have the bigger guns, so I think they'll win any argument.
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A more interesting bit from TFA:
Good call, I hope to finally ditch those dozens of different chargers in a couple of years.
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But just because the military uses it doesn't mean anyone else will. Computers may well get rid of it before long (Apple certainly seems to be doing that). I mean the military also likes Ada, but you don't see it being used to develop desktop apps often (or at all really).
By "dead" I don't think the grandparent means "Gone form the world," they just mean "Has no future in desktop PCs."
All we see as an end user is a cable. We plug one end into the peripheral, and the other into the PC.
Doesn't matter what happens inside the case, we just want a cable
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