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."

Comments

eSATA, Weakest Link, etc

[ergo98]

"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).

Re:eSATA, Weakest Link, etc

[gad_zuki!]

>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.

Absolutely false. 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. USB 2.0 is terrible for hard drives, which is why we have eSata today and need USB 3.0 soon.

Also, your 54mbps wireless g gives you around 20-30mbps not 54.

Re:wire speed vs. practical maximums

[owlstead]

My very old 120GB drive is already faster with Firewire 400 than with USB 2.0, even on older computers. Just for fun also check the SanDisk firewire CF card readers and their performance vs USB.

USB 2.0 is nice and cheap and compatible. It is also completely crap for file transfers. USB 3.0 seems to solve a lot of the issues that 2.0 has at the cost of additional cables and pins. And that's not just speed, it is also polling and high latency etc.

Re:Let's see some all-3.0 computers now!

[timbck2]

That's not what the SuperSpeed USB 3.0 FAQ seems to imply.