Slashdot Mirror
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."
Spec, or it didn't happen.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
"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).
The company is also supplying drivers to make USB 3.0 work with Vista and XP. Windows 7 should have 'native' drivers from not long after launch, or users will hope so. Apple is not yet supported by the XS 3.0.
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!
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
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.
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
speed and cpu load next to a firewire / e-sata disk?
I think that the they are faster with less cpu load.
You must be behind the times. I mean, I've never seen a toaster that didn't come equipped with FireWire.
Promote proofreading. Don't mod up sloppy posts.
It will be supported in Windows 7 SE.
Spec now, or forever old your (US)Bs.
You're confusing the different specs. USB 2.0 theoretically runs at 480Mb/s, while USB 3.0 theoretically runs at 4.8Gb/s. So at peak speed (4.8Gb/s = 0.6GB/s), you would transfer 5GB in just over 8 seconds. So it seems the estimate of 38 seconds is based on real-world speed, not theoretical. 5 GB in 38 seconds would translate into just over 1Gb/s.
bored now.
bring on faster SSDs and SATA-3.
spinning rust is dead.