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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?"
The problem is the original nomenclature from USB 1.0 - "full speed" is a whopping 12Mbit/s (vs. "low speed" at 1.5Mb/s). Of course, compared to serial ports that were starting to push 300kbit/s, it was nice. So then USB 2.0 was "high speed" and for 3.0 they needed something "higher" than "high." Pretty stupid, especially when somebody says a USB 2.0 device runs at "full speed" it could simply be MarketSpeak(TM) saying that it won't slow the bus down below 2.0 but the device itself only communicates at 1.1 speeds.
( Oh, BTW, I vote for PlaidSpeed(TM)! )
I should put something clever here. Maybe someday.
Contrary to the lame doomsday message IFTA, USB isn't going away, people. I see all the millions of devices that use USB for data transfer, power charging, ect. not to mention cellular phone market is finally starting to standardize to micro-USB. On top of that, there's too many TTL 5v devices out there built and designed around USB that it would cause some serious chaos if it did go away. There's no way that something like LightPeak is going to come in and whisk it off of computer hardware manufacturer's list of "things to provide". It may be a high-speed fad like Firewire or something of the recent past, but USB is here to stay.
If you think plain USB is bad, try an eSATAp port. I feel like i'm going to break mine every single time I try to use it :\
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESATAp
On the plus side, you will be able to plug USB 3.0 devices and cables into the USB 2.0 ports on your current computer, but you won’t get the speed advantage.
So one place says it won't work in a 2.0 port, then it says it will .... gah! . . . . . I know they mean (at least, I hope they mean) that you won't get USB3 speeds, but contradictions like this doesn't help the article's credibility
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
What if you have 2 hard drives connected to a hub?
Backing up from a pen drive to an external drive would I thought be a common use case of bulk data transfer.Or from video camera to my mass storage device.
As soon as you allow hubs and caches and protocol overhead and software inefficiencies then a connection significantly faster than the media makes a lot of sense
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
I'm not sure I'd trust that article entirely. From TFA:
But with USB 3.0, even though the plug looks the same, the cable has extra wires. Because of this, it will not work in a 2.0 port..............
On the plus side, you will be able to plug USB 3.0 devices and cables into the USB 2.0 ports on your current computer, but you won’t get the speed advantage.
(my emphasis)
Anyone care to explain this apparent contradiction?
USB 2.0 was such a bottleneck that a stopgap was introduced called eSATA, which allowed for external drives that used a SATA hard drive interface. Well, USB 3.0 pretty much that out to pasture
Sure USB 3 might be rated up to 5Gbits/sec, but in a real world test will it actually be faster than SATA? In file copy tets Firewire at 400mbits/sec is 15-50% faster than USB2 at 480mbits/sec
They're more than just a "bit" slow, IMO. An external HD connected by USB 2 can only really be used for backup, and even then it lags. Firewire is better, but driver problems will occur more often than with USB. Then there's eSata, of which you need 1 per drive. I really hope USB 3 becomes the standard for external storage, possibly even more common than eSata (even though, technically, eSata is cheaper when looking at the overall system).
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
Watch your CPU when comparing USB and eSATA/Firewire.
The one major eSATA issue is power.
Yes, power and hot swapping because windoze doesn't recognize the drive as removeable.
While I understand you were going for humor, Windows (at least back to Win2k) will allow hot-swapping an eSATA drive, as long as the controller is using AHCI.