Posted Wednesday 1st July 2009 16:27 GMT
Now find me a fixed disk that reads and writes at 5Gbps and we're all set. What's that? They don't exist? Oh bother...
Posted Wednesday 1st July 2009 16:27 GMT
Oh dear. Yes, USB3 should break the 30Mb/s (typical) to 40Mb/s (best in class) transfer bottleneck and expose most of the 100Mb/s throughput of drives...
...for a whopping 3x speed improvement. Does that really justify "lightning fast in comparison to today's tortoise-like slowness"?
Meanwhile today's Firewire800 will inevitably deliver higher performance and lower CPU use. It just doesn't deliver 'cheap'.
Posted Wednesday 1st July 2009 16:29 GMT
Firewire blah blah blah....
Posted Wednesday 1st July 2009 16:29 GMT
... should be enough! Finally a use for the BG icon!
Posted Wednesday 1st July 2009 18:40 GMT
Current USB2 can hit 30MB/s - about half the average speed for data transfer from a regular HD.
Backing up gigs to a terabyte class external drive (which are often 5200rpm) will be "lightening"? Unless it's raid 0 or an external SSD...it will still be great to see times halved; but removing the usb bottleneck just reveals the HD bottleneck.
Posted Wednesday 1st July 2009 18:40 GMT
Just think, if you'd gone for Power over Ethernet you'd have been on Gbit speeds ages ago and trialling 10Gbit by now.
USB sucks so bad. so so so so so bad.
We all already knew how to do ethernet, USB is a tar pit; "Don't use Windows, fuck you"
Beer cos they gave me a free pint at work and I feel a bit beligerent
Posted Wednesday 1st July 2009 22:40 GMT
"Backing up tens of gigabytes of data to a terabyte-class external drive will seem lightning fast in comparison to today's tortoise-like slowness."
And the speed of the drive is... what, precisely?
Call it 75 megabytes/sec (or 600 megabits/sec) whereby leapfrogging eSATA speeds means absolutely nothing - you're still limited by bandwidth to the actual platters.
I'm sure there's a killer app for USB 3.0 speeds, but faster external drives ain't it.
Posted Wednesday 1st July 2009 22:40 GMT
Is 5Gbps the theoretical speed or the real speed? Specifically, what will be the actual speed seen from any device when you've got six or eight USB devices plugged in? Perhaps more importantly, what will the drain on the CPU be?
On a side note, couldn't they have come up with a better name than "SuperSpeed"? First we had "Full Speed" 12Mbps; then we had "Hi-Speed" 480Mbps; and now we'll have "SuperSpeed" 5Gbps? What's next? UltraSpeed? No, wait, I know -- ExtremeSpeed, then UltraSpeed, then QuantumSpeed. What's wrong with just using the version numbers and/or numerical speeds? "USB1" or "USB 12Mbps" says a hell of a lot more than "Full Speed".
Posted Wednesday 1st July 2009 22:40 GMT
I'm already planning my usb 3 - raid 0 pen drive sensation. There's going to be a launch party and everything! Wow! You guys are all invited. I'm hoping to get a real life celebrity there .. Carol Vorderman if I'm lucky. Bring a bottle.
Posted Wednesday 1st July 2009 22:40 GMT
To everyone complaining that we've got nothing to make use of the speed that USB3 can offer, what kind of Mr Magoo specs do you wear?
Are you seriously that short sighted that you think we shouldn't be building a transfer system that won't be out of date in 12 months.
If you could get 80% speed out the theoretical maximum of USB3, that's 500MB/s. I don't think it's going to be too far in the future until top end SSDs are start to bump that mark.
Forward thinking, try it sometime.
Posted Thursday 2nd July 2009 12:14 GMT
Personally I'm looking forward to high definition video capture on USB3.
I'm sick and tired of 1.3Mega pixel webcams.
Posted Monday 6th July 2009 23:56 GMT
...Firewire S1600 and S3200 running at 1.6 Gbit/s and 3.2 Gbit/s. Typically you get almost 100% of that throughput reliably with a good amount of juice if you need it. The next version of Firewire will use the same 9-circuit beta connectors as the existing FireWire 800 and will be fully compatible with existing S400 and S800 devices.
I hate USB for anything other than connecting peripherals. I've lost count of the copy fails and data corruption I've suffered at the hands of USB. That has taught me when data matters, use Firewire.
Given the overhead that USB extracts from a computer, typically delivering at best half the theoretical throughput, its unreliability and its anaemic power supply, Firewire once again will kick its arse.
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