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USB 3.0 Getting a Speed Boost To 10 Gbps
cylonlover writes "The USB 3.0 Promoter Group has used CES 2013 to announce an enhancement to the USB 3.0 (aka SuperSpeed USB) standard that will see the throughput performance of USB 3.0 double from 5 Gbps to 10 Gbps. The speed boost will come courtesy of enhanced USB connectors and cables that are fully backward compatible with existing USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 devices. The 10 Gbps SuperSpeed USB update (pdf) is up for industry review during the first quarter of 2013, with completion of the standard expected by the middle of the year."
I can transfer my porn to thumb drive in only a couple of hours now!!!!
So what's the point of having a version number on your standard, if you don't increment the number when you change the standard?
Customer: "This computer has USB 3, but my 10Gbps device only connects at 5Gbps!"
Support Tech: "Oh, that's because you have USB SuperSpeed 3.0 Revision 1 rather than USB SuperSpeed 3.0 Revision 2."
Maybe call it USB SuperSpeed 3.1?
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Can we call it USB 3.1 or something so it's less confusing?
SuperDuperSpeed USB?
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
LOL, will you ever learn? I remember thinking I'd be happy if my internet were as fast as a floppy disk...
USB3 is fairly fast as it is. It uses far to much CPU time right now as in pegging a cpu while writing 150MBs while the internal sata's on the same machine writing to the same model drive is 20%. The enhanced power is not part of the base standard so there is a chicken and the egg issue with anything using it it needs to be baked in. The USB3 spec allows for pc to pc connects but again it's not a requirement to support it so no OS supports it.
No sir I dont like it.
I have an etron and a Renesas USB 3.0 controllers in two different PCs. Both disconnect on large transfers in the range of a few GBs. Sure the transfer rate is holding down 80MB/s but I found them to be completely unreliable. If I plug the 3.0 drive into a 2.0 port the same transfer is made without issue, likewise if I plug a 2.0 drive into the 3.0 port there is no issue. Anybody else experience stability issues with USB 3.0 or is just me.
I think its a matter of scale. So raw uncompressed video signal on an original displayport connector is 4.32 Gbit/s... now instead of a "USB" port being able to carry one uncompressed video signal it could carry two. Of course displayport 1.2 does 17.28 Gbit/s, so we've gone from only 1/4 to only 1/2 of a video signal. On the other hand, displayport has about twice the BW available as HDMI, so you could just about replace HDMI with USB now on a raw available BW basis. Although it would be a heck of a lot more intelligent to shove compressed video down the cable rather than raw uncompressed.
Using USB for a uncompressed video connection is not a valid or useful data point, anyway. But it does make the point that this is competitive with the fastest port anyone is likely to ever have access to. Nothing in your average dude's computer will ever be able to saturate a USB thats faster or about as fast as the video cable. A more normal use case is I'm sure my typing speed was not limited by 5.0 Gigs USB so 10.0 Gigs USB is not going to help.
In the very long run we will not have USB / Firewire / SATA / PATA / Displayport / HDMI we'll have just one connector and protocol to run them all. Plug your keyboard, mouse, LAN adapter and monitor into your hub connected to your phone and be done with it. The only question is which standard will win. Probably USB.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Nothing? Have you paid attention to computing in the last 10 years? Everything is interconnected... if monitor resolutions go up, you damned well better believe the average picture size will go up just so it can be viewed fullscreen without getting blurry. Movies will follow a similar trend (think the SD to HD switch). How about games? I remember how amazed I was that Diablo 2 took so many CDs... and now there's games that take multiple DVDs. What about Windows... and installing from USB thumb drive is becoming icnreasingly popular for software... including operating systems. Not to mention actually running software from USB devices. People will not be happy until even the largest install/transfers happen instantly.
And if you look at corporate arenas, USB storage is very popular for backups. The USB 2.0 interface is currently the biggest bottleneck where I work. USB 3.0 would work for now, but our backups are growing by about 2GB per week (we back up nearly 100GB more now than we did a year ago for the same set of jobs) and trend isn't likely to change in the near future.
And let's not forget niche applications, especially military and science, where you measure data in petabytes and exabytes. All that data needs to be moved sooner or later.
One of these days, USB may even rival the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.
usb?? ssd's on the pci-e bus are faster then sata
So USB could replace SATA.
More likely it will just keep Thunderbolt from ever really taking off. SATA is pretty common and there are enough technical headaches with using USB instead that it is probably going to stick around. (though eSATA might be a different story since it is far less commonly used) But if USB is fast enough there really is limited need for Thunderbolt. I already can run a monitor via USB 2.0 through a docking station I use daily and that works fine.
I'm less interested in faster USB than I am in 100W USB. The ability to power a laptop or small PC with a single USB cable would be huge. Anything that reduces the number of different types of cables I have to deal with is a good thing.
In the very long run we will not have USB / Firewire / SATA / PATA / Displayport / HDMI we'll have just one connector and protocol to run them all. Plug your keyboard, mouse, LAN adapter and monitor into your hub connected to your phone and be done with it. The only question is which standard will win. Probably USB.
That was the hope with Thunderbolt/LightPeak, which is on all Macs these days and works well. One cable carries two full-duplex 10Gb channels (10Gb each way simultaneously per channel). But "docks" have been slow in coming and expensive. And because the USB group refused to integrate the standard or allow them to use the connector, they switched to the DisplayPort interface which is nice and compact. Now we have a slower standard coming much later for which existing cables may or may not work but look the same as the current ones... fun.
E pluribus unum
The new USB 3.0 cables are supposed to have a different logo embossed on them containing an "SS" connected to the old USB "tree" logo. - See section 5.5.6 of the USB 3.0 spec.
USB 3.0 ports and the plastic bit inside the cable connectors are supposed to be color coded blue (Pantone 300C is recommended) - See section 5.3.1.3 of the USB 3.0 spec.
This makes me wonder if the new USB3 could be used as a replacement?
No
How long can the cables be and still maintain 10Gbps speeds?
About 10feet. Unless you had a powered cable or repeater... then about 20 feet.
And could one just connect two computers via USB3 without any additional equipment required in-between?
No, as stated above, you'd need a repeater.
Will someone come up with some USB3-based network routing solution before 10Gbps ethernet - solution become cheap enough for general consumer use?
There already is. You'll have to look around but there are such things. It'd be much easier however, to load balance multiple connections or switch to fiber.
I would have use for higher speeds as 1Gbps just ain't good enough.
That's because you're doing it wrong. Unless you're processing data from your basement super collider, there's no way you need faster than 1Gig. Most likely you have your network setup improperly and are NOT getting 1gig per second. Does your switch support Jumbo frames? Are they turned on? What are you transgering? What speed are your NICs? What speed is your buss? What speed are your hard drives.
The most likely problem that would cause transferring of files from one computer to another over a network is the hard drives. Their transfer rates are no where near 1gig per second. Your buss likely can't support that speed either. Last thing I'd check is your jumbo frames setting.
For lower speed we have Lightning. You get 8 pins plus ground. Over that, you can run pretty much anything that the pins will support, with the embedded chips in the ends doing any pin reassignment. USB3 is 8+ground+shield, so it could probably be run over Lightning. We should be able to run analog audio and video, as well as HDMI and other things too. It is the universal low-speed point-to-point connector.
Thunderbolt is meant for higher purpose than USB3, since you can theoretically run multiple monitors, RAID arrays and even an external video card over one cable at the same time. Basically, you get that old docking station via one small plug.
Of course there will be some meeting in the middle, as USB3, HDMI, Gigabit Ethernet and others can be run on both.
That's because you're doing it wrong. Unless you're processing data from your basement super collider, there's no way you need faster than 1Gig.
That's where YOU are wrong.
Most likely you have your network setup improperly and are NOT getting 1gig per second.
I actually do get 1Gbps speeds.
Does your switch support Jumbo frames? Are they turned on? What are you transgering? What speed are your NICs? What speed is your buss? What speed are your hard drives.
Yes. Yes. Files. 1Gbps. PCI-E x2. Irrelevant, they're in a RAID and can perfectly well saturate the network as-is.
The most likely problem that would cause transferring of files from one computer to another over a network is the hard drives.
That would be true if they weren't in a RAID.
Their transfer rates are no where near 1gig per second.
Cache reads/writes well exceed the 1Gbps, and I get around 400 megabytes/second read-speeds from the array which translates to 3.2Gbps -- well over the network limit.
Your buss likely can't support that speed either.
You might wanna read up on PCI-E.
Last thing I'd check is your jumbo frames setting.
Already said that it is on.
The entire problem with Thunderbolt/LightPeak is cost.
The deal is that if you want a generic interface for lots of purposes, its got to be cheap, or many of those purposes simply don't make any sense when a much more economical solution exists that doesnt require any of those "advanced" features that drive up the cost.,
On the other hand if you want a specific interface with a specific purpose, its also doesnt make sense to increase costs with generic requirements.
The upshot is that by the time the market really looks at Thunderbolt/LightPeak as a viable solution outside of economics-ignoring niches (where the device is expected to be expensive anyways), a cheaper solution will be waiting. Here we are with USB getting a bump that reduces the size of the Thunderbolt niche, and then SATA/eSATA will also get a bump, reducing that niche further...
I agree with the many posters that suggest that SATA3 was too small an increment, and I was even saying that before it was finalized because it was quite apparent that SSD's were already interface limited on SATA2. It didnt' take but a few months for interface-limited SATA3 SSD's to hit the market. The next SATA (Express) will be up to 16gbps.
"His name was James Damore."
It's not that, USB plugs actually have a half-integer spin so that a 360-degree rotation actually inverts their perspective on the universe rather than returning them to the original orientation.
USB is actually a pretty unique case in user-facing plugs, and it rather pisses me off - what idiot thought that a perfect rectangle was a good shape for a connector? It's not like it was a surprise problem - almost every prior external plug was either a trapezoid whose orientation could to told with a glance or touch, or a round DIN which could often be partially inserted and then rotated until the "key" engaged (I rather liked those). Internal ribbon cables had already faced the problem for decades and come up with a progressive variety of solutions that most everyone agreed were sub-par and acceptable only because it was so rarely an issue. The keyed plug and collar had been settled on as the best solution for IDE and floppy cables long before USB was designed, and even that had the advantage over USB that you could often feel the respective orientations when working in situations where you couldn't see one or both of them. And it's not exactly like the solution was in any way difficult, just change the shape of the sheath. For crying out loud even the USB-B connectors designed as part of the same standard were uniquely orientable! /rant
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
How big are 4k high frame rate 3D movie files are going to be? And why would you want to wait longer than you have to? I already hit sequential speeds of 800 MB/s (~8 Gb/s) two years ago with a RAID 0 array of cheap 60 GB SSDs (for fun, not actual usage). Speeds of multiple GB/s are going to be a reality and the average user will find a way to use it. How about off site backups of TB magnitude data? Sure, if you're serious you will use a proper drive interface rather than the hypothetical USB 4, but at some point it will be something that the common person will do, and I can see there being a USB 4 or equivalent to make it easy.
There may be other reasons that USB 3 will be the last USB standard (like your one protocol idea), but the original poster's opinion that "nothing will ever need to transfer that much data per second" is a load of bullshit.