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First-Ever USB 3.0 Hard Drive
dreemteem writes "After 8 years of success, the USB 2.0 standard has begun its long journey into obsolescence. Dutch storage company Freecom has announced the first mainstream storage product based on 'SuperSpeed' USB 3.0. Buyers will be interested to hear that the new external Hard Drive XS 3.0 doesn't cost the earth at £99 (approx $160) for a 1TB drive, even though that excludes the £22.99 for a desktop PCI-bus controller necessary to make it work at its intended throughput. Laptop users can pair it with a £25.99 plug-in PC Card to achieve the same effect."
I just invented 4.0. Estimated at 10,000x as fast as USB 1.0.
Don't try to be a great man. Just be a man, and let history make its own judgment - Zemfram Cochrane
Until USB 3.0 ports are all over computers everywhere, USB 2.0 will be alive and kicking. I just hope they avoid the pitfall some manufacturers did, with some ports in the past having been 1.1 and only some being 2.0 on the same machine. That was a pain. I hope any new computer sold will have either all 2.0 or all 3.0 capable ports, I don't want that stupid design to repeat itself.
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"We now can transfer a 5GB movie in just 38 seconds - it's unbelievably fast," said Freecom's managing director, Axel Lucassen. Assuming that USB 3.0 scales proportionately, USB 2.0 would have transferred the same file in six and a half minutes
Ignoring the naive assumption, USB 2 is as fast or faster than the majority of hard drives (which average reads in the 50-60MB/s range). Buying a faster connection technology won't somehow make your hard drive faster.
Though if you really are concerned, we've had the excellent and widely support eSATA for some time, giving you a 1.5Gbps or 3.0Gbps connection, and if your MB supports SATA, then it supports eSATA. For a second hard drive I put it in an external enclosure supporting both USB 2 and eSATA, and normally use eSATA, sacrificing nothing (and all of the SCSI-like features of SATA are enabled and used).
Interesting that they would begin releasing these while Linux is the only OS to support it...Now I'm not up to speed (pun not intended) on USB drivers, but would this have to come with a driver CD for Windows, or will Microsoft be releasing an update in the near future?
Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
I would so much first post, but my usb 1.1 modem is not fast enough!
here is a little hint...
All those Mac users? They use BSD.
So is SuperSpeed USB 3.0 going to be faster than FullSpeed USB 3.0? And where does ExtremeSpeed USB 3.0 fit in? Is that the one that'll run at 11Mbps?
This guy's the limit!
The drive may not cost the earth, but that's still around 50% more than you'd pay for a 1TB external drive with a USB 2.0 interface.
Just sayin'
AT&ROFLMAO
USB 2.0 will hardly be obsolete any time soon, seeing that the standard is (thankfully) backwards compatible.
I still have USB 1.0 devices. And USB 1.0 ports!
Ignoring the naive assumption, USB 2 is as fast or faster than the majority of hard drives (which average reads in the 50-60MB/s range). Buying a faster connection technology won't somehow make your hard drive faster.
I'm not going to ignore the blatantly wrong assertion that USB2 can transfer data at a 480Mbit/sec (60MB/sec), because it can't. That's wire speed. Latency (each packet must be acknowledged) and software handling of data kill speed dramatically.
http://www.everythingusb.com/usb2/faq.htm#4
As far as we know, effective rate reaches at 40MBps or 320Mbps for bulk transfer on a USB 2.0 hard drive with no one else is sharing the bus. Flash Drives seem to be catching up too with the some hitting 30MB/s milestone. For all we know, USB interface could become become the bottleneck for flash drives as early as 2008. Additional notes from Alex Esquenet - our engineer friend based in Belgium: "A fast usb host can achieve 40 MBytes/sec. The theorical 60 MB/sec cannot be achieved, because of the margin taken between the sof's (125 us), so if a packet cannot take place before the sof, the packet will be rescheduled after the next sof. On top of that, all the USB transactions are handled by software on the PC. For instance, a USB host on a PCI bus will send or receive the data via the PCI bus; the stack will prepare the next data in memory and receive interrupt from the host."
Watch a linux host some time with 'top' as you transfer a bunch of data to/from a USB2 drive, and prepare to be shocked at how much time is sucked up by the USB driver.
So yes, there is an immediate potential benefit given that many desktop drives can now push 100MB/sec at the end of the platter, and at the inside of the platter, still top USB speeds. Whether or not USB3 solves the clusterfuck of software drivers handling low-level protocol details etc is another matter entirely.
In the meantime, buy a firewire 400 card, or even better, a fw800 card. You can get a 400-to-800 adapter cable for anything that isn't fw800, but it's pretty damn easy to find these days. Even if the data doesn't move much faster, you'll be using far less CPU.
Please help metamoderate.
USB serves well as a general purpose interface for a multitude of peripherals. The new transfer rates of USB 3.0 are a nice upgrade overall, and will likely result in some very nice new product capabilities over time. However, in consumer storage USB will likely remain a distant second to SATA-based interfaces, even with the speed boost. USB is nice for portable devices and external, removable drives. I'm hopeful this type of use case is somewhat on the decline. The barrier IMO is lack of options for networked storage in the home that is both cost effective and performs well. I can't imagine USB drives replacing internal storage anytime soon. And, as linked-to in this article, SATA isn't sitting still either and the SATA 3.0 specification is faster still than USB 3.0. In all cases, it seems there is a continuing need for the drives themselves to keep pace with the interfaces. I can't help but think we're close to the end of the line for rotating, magnetic media.
I was intrigued by the statement in the article about connecting to a laptop via PC Card. From the linked article:
"USB 3.0 boosts the theoretical data throughput of USB storage devices to 4.8Gbit/s from USB 2.0's now rather tardy-sounding 480Mbit/s."
Unfortunately, according to WikiPedia, the ExpressCard standard (which is the latest version of PC Card) tops out at 2.5Gbit/s, which, granted, is a lot better than 480Mbit/s, but still only about 1/2 the max speed defined by the USB 3.0 standard. Sounds to me like the PC Card/ExpressCard bus needs to evolve to keep up (although, honestly, I suppose you can say that, largely, the PC Card slot has become redundant because of USB3/FirewireS3200/eSata; anything faster than those will require you to upgrade your laptop, anyhow, to get a faster PC Card slot, so just upgrade to get a faster USB/Firewire/eSata, and forget about PC Card altogether).
"After 8 years of being a White Elephant, the USB 2.0 standard has begun its long-deserved journey into obsolescence. Dutch storage company Freecom has announced the first mainstream storage product based on 'SuperSpeed' USB 3.0. Sheep will be interested to hear that the new external Hard Drive XS 3.0 doesn't cost the earth at £99 (approx $160) for a 1TB drive, even though that excludes the £22.99 for a desktop PCI-bus controller necessary to drive up profit margins. Laptop users can pair it with a £25.99 plug-in PC Card to achieve the same effect. Subtle incompatibilities between manufactures, who will once again just ship the first implementation that almost works, will drive down the usefulness of USB 3.0, providing an excellent excuse for USB 4.0."
Seriously, has anyone gotten anywhere near USB 2.0's promised speed? Firewire would have been officially dead years ago if the claims of USB 2.0 were true.
Not a typewriter
I just want to know if I can use it to attach my computer to my toaster yet.....
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speed and cpu load next to a firewire / e-sata disk?
I think that the they are faster with less cpu load.
Is USB 3.0 backwards compatible with USB 1.1 ?
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Express Card v2? like pci-e v2 comeing soon?
All those Mac users? They use BSD.
Open?
How does 480Mbit/Sec translates to 5GB in 38 seconds? 480Mbits is 60MB/sec. It should take like 1 minute 25, no? and that's with no overhead, and assuming the devices read/write that fast and there is no disk queueing. Or am I missing something?
Starscream: Who disrupts my coronation?
Galvatron: "Coronation", Starscream? This is bad comedy.
Starscream: Megatron? Is that you?
Galvatron: Here's a hint!
[Galvatron transforms and shoots Starscream. Starscream crackles and falls to dust.]
Galvatron: Will anyone else attempt to fill his shoes?
Rumble: What did he say his name was?
Galvatron: Galvatron!
I know we all have so many cores that we don't know what to do with them, but does anyone know the CPU usage of USB 3.0?
Perhaps I've missed something recently, my CPU tends to run more when transferring to/from USB. Since my initial tests I've gone with FireWire whenever possible for external storage (not hard since I mostly have Apple stuff).
Anyone if the USB chip sets / driver are supposed to be looking at this in 3.0?
How much higher will the price for devices, host controllers and cables be compared to USB 2.0, once volumes are large? The main reason USB 2.0 is more common than FireWire is that it's cheaper, especially on the device side but I think also on the computer side and the cables. With the four extra connectors and wires, I suspect manufacturing costs will be higher. How about patent licensing and the control chips?
I never even wanted USB1.1, there were and are better technologies (such as networking or firewire). USB2 addressed the speed issue somewhat, but has so much overhead that the supposed faster usb2 has less throughput than firewire 400. Now we get another USB standard that no user really wanted. (The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them).
But the article mentioned the need for an extra £22.99 controller to make a desktop computer use this drive as intended. I can't help wondering what additional cost beyond this there is for most Windows users, like an expensive "upgrade" to Windows 7? After all, will XP even support this thing, and if so what level of service pack must you infest your system with? Win98 users had to move to XP to use USB2. Most Windows owners even needed to upgrade their OS when USB1.1 came out to use it, is this any different? It seems to me that a high speed networked drive would be a far better choice for most users.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
bored now.
bring on faster SSDs and SATA-3.
spinning rust is dead.
...a USB 3.0 keyboard ?!? I hate typing so slowly.
640k of RAM is all I need.
My laptop doesn't have a PC card slot for the adaptor. Do you think they'd do a USB one? (-:
No they fucking well don't. The OSX kernel is based on the Mach kernel, it just has a BSD subsystem.
OSX has been certified as a UNIX (if that certification actually means anything if you look at who did the certifying), so you can call OSX a UNIX if you like, but it is not a BSD.
Burning disks is slow and annoying, and often they are single use. (Once you've used the disk to move data from point A to point B, you no longer need the disk). I'd love to have a small box of 10 gig USB 2 plugs I could hand back and forth between people as though they were sticks of gum and not worry if you never see them again.
Heck, in the world of Netbooks, (with no CD drives), this becomes even more useful.
--Or, of course, we could always do as the Japanese have done; build an internet infrastructure which moves data around at the speed we need it moved. But in the mean time, having a handful of two-dollar USB 2 plugs around will do quite nicely.
I love it when technology slips off the cutting edge!
-FL
"USB 2.0 real world speeds are around 30-40mb/sec because of all the overhead. A low end hard drive can easily do 60+ mb/sec and bursts well over 100 mb/sec."
You mean MB.
Its obvious he meant megabytes. Christ, do you need to be such a snot-nosed pedant?
I have it on good authority that the OP meant millibits. 30-40mb/sec translates to one bit around every 30 seconds, so you can see why he's not too happy with USB 2.0's performance.
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Why on earth the adapter requires a PC Card? It should just plug into an USB port that every laptop nowadays has...ehh nevermind.
With all the talk about USB taxing the cpu, why don't we have a USB Processing Unit (UPU) somewhere in the mix?
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