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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."

16 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.

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    1. Re:USB3 vs Intel Thunderbolt by modmans2ndcoming · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Yes, but can USB 3 drive multiple monitors over a daisy chain too?

      So I hav e my laptop and I want to plug in an external monitor... bam... thunderbolt.... now I want to plug in an external hard drive, bam... thunderbolt...

      Thunderbolt just reduced the number of ports I need on my laptop from two to one. (USB, DVI/VGA to thunderbolt... great for ultra portables)

    2. Re:USB3 vs Intel Thunderbolt by KonoWatakushi · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Speed aside, Thunderbolt has the potential to work properly, as it will support native SATA. Most USB 2.0 bridge chips ignore critical commands, and put your data at risk. Will 3.0 be better?

      Thunderbolt can also be daisy chained, and unlike with USB, the actual speed is not a small fraction of the theoretical speed. Therefore, a number of devices can be attached, without introducing a bottleneck or requiring a hub.

    3. 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.

    4. Re:USB3 vs Intel Thunderbolt by gandhi_2 · · Score: 3, Funny

      bam... thunderbolt.

      We've just found that guy.

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      THL phish sticks
    5. Re:USB3 vs Intel Thunderbolt by Sabriel · · Score: 5, Funny

      Zeus?

    6. 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.

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      Someone had to do it.
    7. Re:USB3 vs Intel Thunderbolt by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      16,777,216 is the number of possible colors in a 24 bit color space (256 shades = 8 bits, 8 Red + 8 Green+ 8 Blue = 24 bits)

      So 24*1920*1080 = 49,766,400 bits, multiply that frame by 60hz and its still 2.985 gigabit per second, and that's assuming no compression

    8. 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?

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  2. ISA? by Culture20 · · Score: 3, Funny

    I'd love to upgrade. Is anyone making a 16-bit ISA version?

  3. Re:USB 3.0 and FireWire by Tridus · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Cost killed the idea of using USB for low speed peripherals and Firewire for higher speed ones. It's too expensive on a cheap PC to include both ports, so they only included the cheaper one (USB). Because USB was on everything, more devices wound up having USB support.

    Once you have basically everyone with USB 2 and only a subset of those with Firewire, implementing the more expensive Firewire stops making sense on retail systems.

    I can't help but wonder if the same thing will happen with Thunderbolt.

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    -- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
  4. there is a usb 2.0 to ISA card by Joe+The+Dragon · · Score: 3, Informative

    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/

  5. Re:usb 3.0 is in more systems / hardware then Thun by MBCook · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

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  6. Too early by Darinbob · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

  7. Old School? by Sponge+Bath · · Score: 3, Funny

    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"...

  8. 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!?