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Everything You Need To Know About USB 3.0

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?"

3 of 322 comments (clear)

  1. 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?
  2. 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.

  3. Re:Sure, it's fast compared to outdated stuff...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)