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A Late Adopter's Guide To USB 3.0
crookedvulture writes "Even with cheap external hard drives, USB 3.0 offers roughly double the real-world transfer rates of old-school USB 2.0. It's no wonder, then, that USB 3.0 ports are available on most new systems. But what if you want to add USB 3.0 to an existing one? This article goes over what's required and explores the sort of performance improvements you can expect to see. Looks like a no-brainer for anyone who does a lot of transfers to external hard drives."
I'm more interested in seeing what Thunderbolt does - it sounds like it's faster, but it all depends on what the device manufacturers settle on implementing.
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I have a hard time getting too excited about USB 3.0 for hard drive use when everything I have already support eSATA.
The article pretty much says: "Insert PCI card. Turn on computer."
Really? I never would have guessed. I'm so glad to have this valuable nugget of information. I was about to go and buy all new computers!
I don't respond to AC's.
OMG... I haven't adopted a standard that almost nobody else has adopted either. I'm... I'm... NORMAL!
*breaks down in tears*
usb 3.0 is in more systems / hardware then Thunderbolt
also what is apple places for systems like the mini and mac pro for Thunderbolt linking it to the video port kills it uses in a desktop will the Thunderbolt / mini DP cable to DVI or VGA have Thunderbolt break out as well?
or will Thunderbolt be ADC 2?
Haven't really felt the need for USB 3 for hard drives, as I bought an enclosure with USB 2, Firewire 800 and eSATA a while back. Really a shame Firewire didn't take off, since it brought most of the benefits of USB 3 to machines ages ago. Lower CPU usage, device to device transfers, and the spec was prepared to jump to 1600mbit then 3200mbit using the same 800 connector. 1600 (200MB/s) would have been plenty of headroom for hard drives. USB 3 speeds that outpace FW3200 are only useful once you have a newer SSD in the mix, or a decently sized RAID of hard drives.
Looking farther back, I always figured USB would remain in the realm of low speed peripherals (keyboards, etc), and Firewire would be the high speed bus. USB (until 3) is just so CPU heavy at times to be really annoying.
I'd love to upgrade. Is anyone making a 16-bit ISA version?
You read the article?
How many pages long was it, and what was the banner ad count?
One big disadvantrage of USB 2 or 3 compared to eSata and maybe thunderbolt is that it cannot read SMART data to monitor the drives and spin them down to save wear and power.
Thunderbolt uses a chain, and the last device is a regular displayport(which is supposed to work with any displayport 1.2 adapter). http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/desktop-hardware/2011/02/25/thunderbolt-speeds-on-new-macbook-pro-40091943/8/#story
http://www.arstech.com/item-USB-2-0-to-ISA-card-ROHS-usb2isar.html
there is a Zorro to USB 2.0 card.
http://www.e3b.de/usb/
But USB 3 isn't in a ton of systems. Thunderbolt will stop being Apple exclusive next year (IIRC), so why should I bother? At this point a hard drive is the only thing I'm likely to use that would stress USB3, I mean I can already record HD video over USB2.
I already have FireWire 800, and have for a few years, and it's very fast, and extremely low overhead. Since I don't go around copying multiple gigs of files between drives, the speed benefit of USB3 isn't really going to matter much to me. Given the average level drive attached, if FW is a bottleneck, I'm probably close to 80-90% of the drive speed. I have FW since I'm on a Mac, but many people on Windows boxes have eSATA ports. They're faster than USB3 (since it's the HD's native interface) and lower overhead (again, the native interface of the drive). I know they were supposed to make the CPU overhead of USB3 better than 2, but my guess is it's still noticeably higher than FireWire or eSATA.
Basically, I think USB3 took too long. It's out, but it's third party chips on motherboards. That means the situation where some of your ports are v2 and some are v3. When space is at a premium (like laptops), it's more likely you'll only get v2 ports until Intel embeds a controller. But FW800 is available in add in cards and has a higher adoption rate (right now). eSATA cards are common and available in add in cards. USB2 is fast enough for many people.
By the time USB3 becomes more common, Thunderbolt will already have a decent market. Apple putting it in their high-end computers (at least the MBPs) means that drive enclosures and such will be released in the next few months.
For the average consumer, I don't think they need USB3 or will for a while. By the time they do, there is a good chance Thunderbolt will start looking really attractive (one cable and your monitor, scanner, hard drive and whatever else are plugged in). And since Thunderbolt easily has the bandwidth to have adapters to plug SATA or USB2/3 devices into Thunderbolt ports... it's a safe choice.
I'm sure USB3 will be everywhere in a year or two, but only because it's a backwards compatible drop in replacement. I don't think it will be out of any real necessity. Only people copying large amounts of data (video editing, large media libraries, etc) would get the benefit, and at that point you might as well go eSATA.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Louis Vuitton brand enjoys high reputation at home and abroad.
Well not anymore at this home!
That and the fact that everyone and everything is USB3 now. Apparently I've been asleep for a while because everything I use and own is still usb2.
You're nothing; like me.
But at some time in the future you won't be able to avoid buying a new usb-card. You will go with usb3, because cards without usb3 will be much more expensive and most peripherals with usb3 will be cheaper than the ones with usb2. - That's a late adopter.
2 pages, and what ads? I use Adblockplus..
I could see this being useful if the peripherals supported it.
It's entirely impossible to be a "late adopter" at this stage.
First William Shatner turns 80, now USB 2 is old school. I'm sure that makes some people feel old. Hold on, there's someone at my door who says he's here about the "reaping"...
Um...ADC was strictly Apple's own connector. Thunderbolt is backed by Intel. There's a pretty big difference here. In addition, Thunderbolt is a helluva lot more versatile. You can adapt it to just about anything, so while there may be Thunderbolt peripherals, it's not going to be necessary for a bunch of them for Thunderbolt to succeed. In addition, outside of some very high-end stuff, even if a peripheral does have a Thunderbolt port, I doubt that would be its only connectivity.
I think that if TB catches on, laptop manufacturers are going to LOVE it, especially ultraportables. No more slapping a dozen ports on a laptop or trying to cram as many as possible into an ultraportable. TB takes care of everything but power. That also simplifies manufacturing and reduces cost.
It's more about the chipset interface... the driver complexity is greatly reduced with a USB-3 chipset. Intel really screwed up the HCI for USB-2 and USB-1, and they barely worked even when properly implemented. The USB-3 HCI is a much cleaner design. There is this Intel commercial sporting the creater of USB being fawned at by all the woman in the office... every time I see it I feel like socking him one for doing such a bad job.
With most devices sporting wifi (let alone ethernet), fewer and fewer people need portable hard drives these days so it is almost irrelevant. It doesn't even matter that wifi is slower, since it tends to be available all the time or nearly all the time. I still use usb disk keys but my self-powered portable usb hard drives have been collecting dust for well over a year now.
USB is basically the interface for flash keys, keyboards, mice, game controllers, printers, scanners, cameras, and other odds and ends (e.g. wifi if you machine doesn't have it built in, serial ports if you still need them since most machines don't have them any more, etc). None of those really requires ultra high speed.
If you want an external drive eSATA or firewire (ignoring expensive ethernet-based network drives) are the only really reliable games in town... only someone who really really wants to lose their data uses USB as a serious hard drive interface.
-Matt
Not only that, Thunderbolt is owned and controlled by Intel, Apple was and is a partner since the beginning but Apple has no control over how Intel will use/license Thunderbolt.
Is this what Slashdot has come to? A how-to guide on how to add a new card to your computer!?
Quote: "USB 3.0 offers roughly double the real-world transfer rates of old-school USB 2.0."
That puts it on par with Firewire 400. Now that's old school, pre-dating even USB 1.0!
My wife just brought home a new LaCie external hard drive, we plugged it into my Thinkpad's eSATA port, Linux immediately detected it, and I could access it like any other drive to partition and format it. I saw sustained 100-120 MB/s performance while formatting the 1TB drive.
ADC was DVI + USB + power, nothing really special. A simple (3rd party) converter was all that was needed to get a DVI signal. It was darn convenient though to have a single connector to your computer.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Until someone cheaps out and makes a non-conforming device that doesn't pass the displayport through -- if USB is anything to go by, it'll probably have the sole purpose of siting on your desk and looking stupid (ala "USB humping dog", "USB fishtank", and such). Sure, being non-compliant, it won't be able to license the trademarked thunderbolt logo, but morons will buy it, use it, and wonder why their system is fucked (other than by an animatronic dog).
I remember problems with external SCSI devices (remember those?) where one device didn't have a daisy-chain connector, and another device had one, but due to crappy internal wiring, caused random glitches in anything farther down the chain, so they both had to be the end of the chain, which means I had to pick and choose between tape backup or CDROM, and reboot if I wanted to change it. Daisy-chaining's fine in theory, and in practice with good hardware, but pardon me if I'm a little skeptical in a world where home users can't afford to buy all the devices they want of pro-level hardware...
And, as Joe The Dragon was trying to point out (I think, hard to tell in the absence of English), what happens when I add a thunderbolt PCIe card to my desktop? Does it come with a crappy graphics chipset to drive the displayport? Does it come with a dongle hanging out the ISA bracket to plug back into a spare displayport on my graphics card? Maybe it'll only be available integrated on motherboards (with integrated graphics) or on video cards.
I'm not as pessimistic about it (or as illiterate, but hey, typing must be hard with claws) as Joe The Dragon, but the integration of general-purpose data and video doesn't seem particularly desirable outside of laptops, and that combined with daisy-chaining's amplification of problems with inevitably crappy cheap hardware makes it that much harder to become an accepted standard on desktops.
I'm not trying to bait you, but you are talking with USB 3.0 devices?
The US government have made it clear that we have no inalienable rights; any we do not defend vigorously will be taken.
Right away you know this guy lives in his own little world. I can guarantee if you walk into a retail store today and checked each desktop and notebook, less than 1 in 10 will have USB 3.0.
Sure, but now there are a bunch of otherwise good and working ADC monitors floating around that aren't worth a damned thing unless you bundle a converter with them.
Chances are I'll stick with USB2/eSATA for the time being. I use USB for peripherals, which don't benefit from USB3 at all, and for thumbdrives (all USB2) which don't really need all that speed anyways. If I want to plug my external HDD, both my desktop and my laptop have eSATA ports.
In short, USB3 feels somewhat redundant. It will only take off as USB2 gets phased out, mostly because USB2 is still considered "good enough". Obviously, we might not even see USB3 gain dominance if Thunderbolt is more popular and widespread. I'm personally more interested by that than USB3.
laptop manufacturers are going to LOVE it
I agree, but PC makers are very reluctant to drop legacy ports. I suspect it is because they can claim more features on the marketing blurb.
-- Braden's law of data: All data spends some of its lifetime in an excel spreadsheet.
Oh! How we wished we had pliars! You had it great, we had to use our teeth to scrape off the traces for the interrupts and redraw them using whale oil lamps to melt the solder.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
So USB 3.0 is on its way in, and I'll expect to see it on (mid-range) motherboards in the near future...
But how about USB 3.0 devices? I'm sure we all have whole piles of USB devices (Flash drives, etc.). Will these do anything different when plugged into a USB 3.0 port, or will we have to wait for new Flash drives to see more performance?
Skip past USB3 and proceed directly to Thunderbolt. USB has ALWAYS had some serious shortcomings. 3 is the best iteration to date but now Thunderbolt has made USB3 obsolete before it's gaining any traction....dead before it ever got popular.
No, cards providing USB 3.0 ports. Which are backwards compatible.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Has anyone else here tried to get a device certified by the USB-IF? It's a weirdly arbitrary process.If whatever the Thunderbolt people come up with is more rational, I'm down.
Reason is that it is just a PCIe bus extension, not an entierly new protocol (of course there is hardware involved in getting it to the new format). Also Intel doesn't have any licensing fees on it I can see. Part of FW's problem is it has fees. While that doesn't sound like a lot, it adds up. When you are designing cheap consumer electronics, pennies count.
Also Intel may well integrate it in to their chipsets. If so, implementation on the computer is very cheap. You just hook up the ports more or less. That is part of what helped drive USB is that Intel included it in their chips (it is their spec). FW, of course, was and is an addon so an additional chip needs to be put on the board.
Plus FW had the problem of not scaling well. When it came out, wonderful it was the fast connector, USB the slow one. The USB2 comes out. Because of the lower overhead FW400 was actually faster, but not really a whole lot. Made USB2 rather attractive as the One Connector to Rule Them All. Firewire 800 didn't come out for a couple more years, needed a whole new connector, and initially was pretty much Apple only. By that time the ship had already sailed on USB2 largely.
If it does scale to the speeds they hope, I think it has a future. Thunderbolt gives you low level access, being PCIe it has DMA and all that jazz. That is good in terms of latency and overhead, bad in terms of security. That means there are cases where it is what you want and cases where you don't. For those you don't. USB is an excellent choice. Higher performance overhead, but more secure.
There can potentially be a future for more than one connector.
I really don't see why it's apparently one or the other. They aim at doing pretty different things, and you'd really want both ports.
As soon as Intel bothers to include it in their chipsets, USB3 will get ubiquitous as USB2. It's now fast enough for pretty much anything general-purpose. More importantly, devices using USB controllers are significantly cheaper - USB is a much simpler protocol (since the host does most of the work), and is cheap as chips to implement. Add in the backwards compatibility and USB isn't going anywhere, even if most peripherals don't take full advantage of its full speed.
Thunderbolt has even more performance, and you'd want one just to plug in to your monitor, since it carries a full DisplayPort channel. Since it also carries 4 PCIe lanes & allows full access to system memory, you can attach almost anything to it, even a USB3 host or an external GPU (though at 4 lanes it still won't be as fast as internal). However, you need a full PCIe controller at the external end, so it will never be as cheap to implement, or as ubiquitous, as USB.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
"ME ME ME ME ME ME ME..."
You idiot.
Your post shows that you can't even begin to imagine other people's needs...
"Since *I* don't need it, how could anyone else?"
You aren't a user interface designer for Microsoft by any chance?
I'll wait for Light Peak (or whatever the hell they call it.) It has a lot better features for situations where you actually need high throughput, and not just filling up a hard drive really quick.
My findings after using USB3 devices for five months:
Not surprisingly, USB3 gives much better transfer rates than USB2. Slightly more than double the transfer rate than its predecessor.
Fedora in their wisdom have decided, since it causes some problems with suspend mode, to disable the xhci_hcd module in Fedora 14. To get USB3 you need to pass xhci_hcd.enable=1 to the kernel start parameters.
Gripes:
USB3 drives still drop off randomly, require physical removal and re-insertion. This fact alone is a show-stopper for permanent installations, ie anything other than casual use.
USB3 does nothing to address the glaring lack of hardware interrupts in the USB design. Because of this there is no way for example to power on your computer with a USB keyboard unless you have what amounts to an operating system handling USB enumeration and polling devices for events. This is one advantage PS/2 keyboards still have.
Of course to maintain backwards compatibility USB3-A still suffers from the horrible flaw of a symmetrical outer but asymmetric inner connector. USB B connectors never had this problem, but which does the ubiquitous flash drive use?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Lightpeak/Thunderbolt support hubs ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbolt_(interface) )
Since Thunderbolt is displayport 1.2 you can actually plug two displays into each thunderbolt port, so a hub makes a lot of sense anyway.
It will be interesting to see what happens with PCIe expansion cards, but I don't see why a display-less Thunderbolt would be a problem for desktops.
eSATA = 300MB/s
USB 3 = 625MB/s
not that an external USB 3 housing with a SATAII drive in it is going to even come close to 300MB/s ... but eSATA is NOT faster than USB 3.
There are fashionable women on /.?
You want Intel to own your pipes, don't you?
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Hmm. Of course, I don't suppose there are a lot of SSDs hanging off of serial scsi ports.
Maybe?
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
I just lost a USB flash drive. Tried everything I could to recover it, and it's just dead.
It did warn me before it died, Japanese characters in file names turning into question marks and such. I think I got all my data off of it and into a tarball, but I'm not sure.
I think the device was still under warranty, but it's going to cost me enough to send it in and get it fixed (by replacement, I'd guess), and Buffalo is not going to recover my data for me, so why bother?
I'm always having problems with USB. Not to mention that the connector slips out awfully easily. I used to think it made an OK replacement for the floppy disk drive, but not now.
USB does not strike me as something you want to have important data riding on.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
I actually ended up taking an external hard drive out of its casing and putting it inside the PC case via garden-variety SATA connection because I was tired of USB transfer speed or the lack thereof.
Of course, I wasn't really using it portably anyway, and making it an internal hard drive also cut down on the "rat's nest".
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Prada is much better both ways. Also they have a SUV that is compartible with all and every other Prada product.
All Louis Vuitoon has is bags. And even for that they needed a commie Gorbi to get any market attention http://theinspirationroom.com/daily/2009/gorbachev-on-louis-vuitton-journey/
Or it may be that there are segments of the market that truly need the older ports to support hardware that has an extremely long refresh cycle.