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back to article SuperSpeed USB PCs to ship by year-end

Getting tired of waiting for backups to an external drive to complete? The first PCs using SuperSpeed USB could appear by the end of the year, with 2010 seeing the start of a mass rollout. According to a Techon Nikkei report, Taiwanese PC manufacturers will be first off the mark. SuperSpeed USB, or USB 3.0, increases the …

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  1. Steven Hunter
    Thumb Down

    Wonderful...

    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...

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  2. Paul Shirley

    lightning fast?

    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'.

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  3. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    3....2....1....0 A tile is still required

    Firewire blah blah blah....

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  4. Andy Barber
    Gates Halo

    640kb...

    ... should be enough! Finally a use for the BG icon!

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  5. DT
    Pint

    great expectations

    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.

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  6. dave lawless
    Pint

    PoE

    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

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  7. Anonymous Coward
    WTF?

    Think about the bottleneck for your example...

    "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.

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  8. Chris C

    Theoretical or real?

    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".

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  9. Dan Keating
    Linux

    Smart arsed comment

    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.

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  10. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    what are you moaning about

    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.

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  11. Stuart Halliday
    Happy

    Looking forward to High-Def

    Personally I'm looking forward to high definition video capture on USB3.

    I'm sick and tired of 1.3Mega pixel webcams.

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  12. Peter Mc Aulay
    Pint

    Four words

    "Cheap external RAID enclosure"

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  13. Stuart Duel
    Megaphone

    I'm waiting for....

    ...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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