USB 3.0 Hardware Details Revealed

[stampeder]

Hardware details of USB 3.0 released at CES. Its called "SuperSpeed USB" and is set to deliver data transfer speeds of around 4.7Gb/s if approved.

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/01...sb_3_revealed/

[granduncle]

Fortunately, the standoff between 2 incompatible versions of the
next generation USB (what ruined v.1.0) has been avoided...
Here they look at the specs, cable samples, connectors, etc. including wireless USB
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/fea...d_cable_photos

[DGenerate]

Well, since I haven't found any threads about this yet... let's chat this up with thoughts...

Here is a report from Cnet.

Dated Jan. 13th 2009

Intel demonstrated a working version of USB 3.0 at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week. Here's why it will make eSATA and FireWire obsolete.

When USB 3.0 is expected to hit the market in early 2010, it will have been 10 years since the now ubiquitous USB 2.0 was introduced (April 2000). The current USB 2.0 specification runs at a theoretical maximum speed of 480Mbps, and can supply power.

According to the USB Implementers Forum, there were 2 billion USB 2.0 devices shipped in 2006 (one for every three people in the world), and the install base was 6 billion (almost one for every person in the world). In November 2007, the USB Implementers forum announced the USB 3.0 specifications, and Intel officially demonstrated the technology at CES 2009.

Now, the juice: USB 3.0 promises a theoretical maximum rate of 5Gbps, meaning it's 10 times faster than USB 2.0. USB 3.0 is also full duplex, meaning it can upload and download simultaneously (it's bi-directional); USB 2.0 is only half duplex.

Put side by side with eSATA and FireWire 800, USB 3.0 is far superior. eSATA, an external connection that runs at the same speed as the internal SATA 1.0 bus, has a maximum theoretical of 3Gbps. This makes USB 3.0 faster than eSATA and about six times faster than FireWire 800 (full duplex at 800Mbps).

USB 3.0 also provides another advantage; while eSATA is faster than FireWire 800, unlike FireWire it cannot supply power. USB 3.0 has the advantage of being faster than both, even while supplying power.

Finally, USB 3.0 has improved power management, meaning that devices can move into idle, suspend, and sleep states. This potentially means more battery life out of laptops and other battery-based USB-supporting devices like cameras and mobile phones.

Of course, there are other factors to consider; the FireWire 3200 standard is also in the works and promises to allow 3.2GHz speeds on existing FireWire 800 hardware. USB 2.0 generally doesn't meet its theoretical maximum throughput, due to its dependence on hardware and software configuration, where FireWire gets much closer.

It's hard to say whether USB 3.0's updated architecture will still use more CPU time than FireWire does.

But in the age of powerful hardware (can anyone say "3.2GHz, quad-core CPUs"?), all of this means that FireWire is still not going to match USB 3.0's theoretical maximum of 5Gbps.

The ultimate signal that this war has already been won is Apple's recent decision to ditch FireWire from its consumer line in favor of USB. Previously, Cupertino had been one of FireWire's greatest advocates. And surely the company will be one of the first to adopt USB 3.0.

All in all, we can't wait for motherboard manufacturers like Gigabyte and Asus to start supporting the technology and mainstream PC builders like Dell to start integrating it into their products. Bring on the speed.

[DGenerate]

Let me tell you... 2010 can't come fast enough!!! And I still laugh at the 480MBPS that we're SUPPOSED to get with USB 2.0. I've never got higher than 10.0 MBPS!!!

[EFP]

Yeah, I heard about USB 3.0. That’s fast!!!

Dgenerate, must be something wrong with your system. I have an ATA166 HDD in an USB 2.0 enclosure and it’s almost as fast as if the HDD was connected to the ATA-166 IDE. I’d say I.m getting at least 100 MBPS from the HDD connected to the USB 2.0 port. The USB 2.0 ports really are capable of the rated 480 Mbps if the connected hardware will go that fast, along with the rest of your system.

[DGenerate]

EFP, was there a certain software or something you did to get that speed? I just bought a Seagate 250GB HD and put it in a portable storage unit with USB 2.0 cord. Right now doing a transfer from laptop to the HD at 10.2 MBPS. Do tell brotha!

[recneps77]

Be careful not to confuse Mbps and MB/s
I've gotten 20+ MB/s with usb flash drives / portable HDD's
That's 160 mbps.
(Mbps = megabits per second, MB/s = megabytes per second)
There is a factor of 8 difference between a bit and a byte. (8 bits in one byte)

[DGenerate]

Good to know. Right now as I'm typing... I'm getting 10.2 MB/sec

[EFP]

Well, I might have been wrong.
I just tested three drives connected to three different interfaces. It seems that even with my 6-month-old WD SATA-300 connected to the SATA-2 interface, I’m only getting a sustained speed of 61.38 MB/s

[PHAND]

There is a significant number of things that need to be considered for any sort of benchmark.

We did a LOT of testing of USB mass storage devices under Windows 98 through XP Pro over many years. USB has a high CPU load, meaning the CPU of your computer manages all the USB bus activity and stealing cycles. FireWire is a hand-off transaction, the CPU approves it and then the transfer is managed by the Firewire implementation itself.

There are a number of things that go into the read speed of a drive..

1) The RPM of the disc
2) The density of the disc
3) The buffer on the disc
4) The native bus of the disc (PATA/SATA)
5) The bus that the disc is connected to the host with (USB)
6) The file system
7) Block size of the file system
8) Organization of the file being read
9) The speed of the host
10) Other things the host may be doing
11) Lots more

Getting 61 megaBYTES a second on a sustainted read isn't a bad thing.

[asif9t9]

Certainly fast, which is important. But I was hoping for something wireless.

[EricReesor]

There are already pcix usb3.0 cards available in Japan, though I have not seen them in Canadian retail stores yet.

I do audio recording and am very interested in the possibility of easily recording high bit rate studio grade multi-track directly to very fast external drives. It would be a huge time saver getting huge audio and/or video files to portable drives so that I could just ship the thing off for editing.

Up until now firewire has been the standard in audio and video recording because it does not do things the same way as USB2.0 and does not have as many latency issues.

Most of my high end gear is firewire but it would be really cool if I could eventually do my recording directly through the bus to a pcix USB3.0 drive. Rather than having to record to internal then pump it out to a slow usb or firewire drive!

Here is the first release that I have seen of a USB 3.0 external drive.

Does anyone on this forum have any experience with Windows 7 and USB3 yet?

[recneps77]

What's wrong with eSATA?
It's been around for a while now and provides more bandwidth than your external drive can handle.

[EricReesor]

Originally Posted by recneps77

What's wrong with eSATA?
It's been around for a while now and provides more bandwidth than your external drive can handle.

From what I have been reading hot swapping e-sata can be problematic to say the least. I think my mobo supports it but from what I read it is very dicey.

To run e-sata I have to run it off one of my 4 sata ports on the mobo there is no separate e-sata soldered on, like some boards.

FireWire is still the best solution to date because it does not require transactional IRQs. However USB 3 could make up for this with shear speed. I hate having to change my mobo everytime I upgrade my hardware. It takes another stupid call to Redmond or India or wheretheheck they do it today to get my system working again! Just so I can sell off the old MOBO!

[ScaryBob]

I use a free utility called HotSwap.exe to hot swap eSATA drives. It works like a charm to add and remove drives under XP and Win7. Just make sure drive indexing and any other programs that lock the drive are disabled/closed. Some SATA controllers do not support eSATA well but newer Intel motherboard SATA ports and newer drive cases/docks work very well. I also use a SATA to eSATA adapter to create an eSATA port on one of the case slots.