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Asus Delivers Speed Boost With USB Attached SCSI Protocol

MojoKid writes "When USB debuted in 1999, it offered maximum throughput of 12Mb/s. Today, USB 3.0 offers 4.8Gb/s. Interestingly, modern USB 3 controllers use the same Bulk-Only Transport (BOT) protocol that first debuted in 1999. Before the advent of USB 3, relying on BOT made sense. Since hard drives were significantly faster than the USB 2 bus itself, the HDD was always going to be waiting on the host controller. USB 3 changed that. With 4.8Gbits/s of throughput (600MB/s), only the highest-end hardware is capable of saturating the bus. That's exposed some of BOT's weaknesses. UASP, or the USB Attached SCSI Protocol, is designed to fix these limitations, and bring USB 3 fully into the 21st century. It does this by implementing queue functions, reducing command latency, and allowing the device to transfer commands and data independently from each other. Asus is the first manufacturer to have implemented UASP in current generation motherboards and the benchmarks show transfer speeds can be improved significantly."

6 of 93 comments (clear)

  1. I like my drives by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    like I like my women, FAST, WIDE and SCSI

  2. throughput vs bandwidth by sribe · · Score: 4, Insightful

    When USB debuted in 1999, it offered maximum throughput of 12Mb/s.

    Well, no, it didn't. It was based on 12Mb/s signaling rate, but delivered substantially lower actual throughput. There's a paper on the usb.org website that runs through it all, showing how the relatively large overhead of the protocol affects throughput.

  3. Re:This will never catch on if... by mcbridematt · · Score: 5, Informative

    It isn't proprietary - it is part of the USB3 spec, but hardware that actually supports it appears to have been missing, until now. There has been a Linux driver for a while now, and TFA says Windows 8 will implement it too.

  4. Re:This will never catch on if... by mister_playboy · · Score: 4, Informative

    USB debuted in 1999?

    I had USB in Windows 98.

    TFS is just plain wrong. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB...

    "The original USB 1.0 specification, which was introduced in January 1996, defined data transfer rates of 1.5 Mbit/s "Low Speed" and 12 Mbit/s "Full Speed". The first widely used version of USB was 1.1, which was released in September 1998. The 12 Mbit/s data rate was intended for higher-speed devices such as disk drives, and the lower 1.5 Mbit/s rate for low data rate devices such as joysticks."

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  5. SCSI over USB?! by Dasher42 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Just when I'm really, really tired of the acronyms, there's SCSI over USB. What's next, orange juice out of apples? Kia to Tesla conversion kits? Vegan outback steakhouses? Elegant Perl code?!

  6. Re:USB as RAM? by TheGratefulNet · · Score: 4, Interesting

    search for 'vertical usb flash' and you can find internal tiny usb 'thumbdrives' that mount right on the 10pin (iirc) usb mobo header. inside the case. has been that way since about the start of vista days (1gb was somewhat common as a 'cache' you could use).

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