Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

A Late Adopter's Guide To USB 3.0

Posted by timothy on from the will-wait-for-the-really-late-adopter's-guide dept.

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."

6 of 185 comments (clear)

  1. USB3 vs Intel Thunderbolt by Speare · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    --
    [ .sig file not found ]
    1. Re:USB3 vs Intel Thunderbolt by gabebear · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Conversely, USB3 drives won't get you any extra speed on most laptops since Intel still hasn't included a USB3 chipset in anything and few laptop manufacturers want the extra expense and power drain of a separate USB3 controller. Dell has been putting combined USB2/eSata ports on their laptops for years now so they aren't that hard to find on laptops.

    2. Re:USB3 vs Intel Thunderbolt by skids · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Pathetically, the point won't be whether fw800 is faster, or carries more watts, or has better realtime/isochronus performance, or chose a better cable that runs longer and is more noise-free, or that fw drivers stacks won't have to be rewritten to deal with whatever new set of kludges has been added this time around.

      The point will be that USB3 will be on everything by default, and fw800 will be very hard to find on a laptop, and everything with a fw800 port will be more expensive than the USB variant.

      --
      Someone had to do it.
    3. Re:USB3 vs Intel Thunderbolt by hairyfeet · · Score: 3, Insightful

      And you can thank Steve Jobs for that, thanks Steve! You see while USB was dirt cheap to implement Apple charged something like a buck a port to add Fw. Now if you are a hardware manufacturer, where margins are razor thin, why do you choose? the protocol that costs practically nothing, or the one that costs a buck a port? Firewire is a perfect example where the lesser tech won simply because the greater tech was too damned expensive. Thanks to the Apple greed Fw is practically toast and USB is everywhere. Thanks Steve!

      I wouldn't be surprised if the same thing happened to that thunderbolt/lightwave whatever the hell they are calling it VS USB 3. It will be used on Macs, which are still a tiny niche (the big growth at Apple is iOS, not OSX) whereas everybody and their dog will have USB 3 just as you pointed out.

      My question is this: when do we reach the max? What is the max? With Gb Ethernet I'm already slamming some of these drives as fast as they'll go, and SSD simply won't be able to match HDD for price anytime in the foreseeable future so they won't help because eventually you'll have to transfer to HDD anyway. So how fast is the fastest we can go without data corruption? I'm all for faster but not at the cost of increased corruption. So how fast can we pump data through the average desktop before corruption becomes an issue? How close are we to hitting this limit? I mean we've already hit a wall with CPUs (4Ghz) which is why we are adding cores now, so which will come next? Memory or storage?

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
  2. Too early by Darinbob · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's entirely impossible to be a "late adopter" at this stage.

  3. Really? by hawguy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Is this what Slashdot has come to? A how-to guide on how to add a new card to your computer!?