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Everything You Need To Know About USB 3.0

Posted by timothy on from the it-goes-one-louder dept.

Esther Schindler writes "After a lengthy gestation period, the third generation of the Universal Serial Bus is making its way to the market. USB 3.0, also known as SuperSpeed USB, has throughput of up to 5 gigabits per second. That's even faster than the 3Gb/sec of SATA hard drives and 1Gb/sec of high-end networking in the home. USB 3.0: Everything You Need to Know goes into plenty of the techie details. But is it already obsolete — will LightPeak make USB 3.0 irrelevant?"

8 of 322 comments (clear)

  1. Sure, it's fast compared to outdated stuff... by Timothy+Brownawell · · Score: 4, Insightful

    SATA is up to 6.0 Gb/s now, and networking is starting to hit 10Gb/s.

    1. Re:Sure, it's fast compared to outdated stuff... by Jesus_666 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Does USB 3 finally have a controller? I mean a real one, not the "let's just offload half our work to the CPU" nonsense USB 1, 1.1 and 2 have. Yes, it's cheap but it's also a recipe for horrible throughput (see FireWire S400 being faster then USB 2.0) and puts an unneccessary burden on the CPU.

      I'd like USB better if it wasn't implemented in such a half-assed way. The connectors are horrible (whoever thought that a symmetric-looking but really asymmetric connector was a good idea?), it's incapable of daisy-chaining without hubs, it's strictly host-peripheral and its reliance on the CPU degrades its own performance.


      USB is a nice idea but sometimes I wish FireWire had made the cut instead. Apart from the fact that it can DMA wherever it wants it's essentially USB done right. Likewise, I hope that Light Peak makes its way to the market soon as it doesn't seem to share many of USB's shortcomings.

      USB is great for HID. Everything else not so much.

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      USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
  2. Re:Quantum leaps in speed? by Sockatume · · Score: 5, Insightful

    That term's annoying because it's trivially true and means nothing. All technological changes are quantised. You don't get a continuous change from the iPod Classic to the iPod Touch, outside of a Cronenberg-and-cheese-sandwich-induced nightmare.

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    No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
  3. Re:hard disk speed by Tynin · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The only reason I can see would be if you had an external USB enclosure that housed multiple drives that you plan on RAIDing. With the speeds of SSD drives still ramping up, it is possible you could saturate even USB 3 with just 2 drives.

  4. Re:SuperSpeed USB... by blahplusplus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is why they should just use bandwidth numbers. I never understood why they started language unrelated to the specifications.

  5. Re:hard disk speed by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The one major eSATA issue(I don't know why they overlooked this the first time) is power. For 3.5inch drives, or multi drive external towers/shelves, this doesn't matter at all. An external PSU is a given. For the "single 2.5 inch or smaller in portable case" case, the fact that USB3 delivers the bandwidth(and is backwards compatible right back to the two-1.1-ports stuff that they were shipping in the mid 90s) and the power, while eSATA delivers only the bandwidth, requiring a seperate connector for power, pretty much ruins things. If eSATA had included power from the start, it might have been a much better contender.

    As a replacement for SCSI type use cases, of course, USB is a toy and eSATA or SAS is the natural replacement; but for the vast market for flash drives, 2.5 inch externals, and mass-market, works-with-anything 3.5 inch externals, eSATA is doomed compared to USB(especially since a USB port can be used for non storage purposes, while an eSATA port is pretty much storage only. In principle, a high speed serial interconnect like SATA could be used for other stuff; but I've never seen it actually done in practice.

  6. Re:SuperSpeed USB... by jandrese · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Because the marketing people say that numbers are scary.

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    I read the internet for the articles.
  7. Re:SuperSpeed USB... by jandrese · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This is also why monitors come in nice and easily memorable names like WSXGA+ and WQXGA (not to be confused with QWXGA) instead of something scary or potentially useful like 1680x1050.

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    I read the internet for the articles.