Posted on 12/07/2009 11:16:55 AM PST by ShadowAce
I hate it when my ports are obsolete.
...me too. Personally a little slower upgrade speed has been okay with me just for that reason.
I just bought a cheapo dell laptop. VGA output and no HDMI.
Why do this Dell?
I just got my first new (refurbished) computer in years. It’s a good one. Now I have to start wanting something else...
I’d imagine 3.0 will be backwards compatible. The connector is the same on the PC-side. The device-side connectors are different, as they have been with past revisions.
I've bought my last two laptops from Dell, refurbished, and been happy with them but somehow the company doesn't seem quite as cutting edge as it was. (I don't buy very often at all but I kinda keep track.)
While 3rd generation USB is good news; let’s put things in perspective. When you are fetching small files, the cache and the burst speed of a protocol makes a big difference. However, when you are tranferring large amounts of data (copy files from one drive to another) you quickly saturate the on-board cache, and the mechanical drive of the Hard drive becomes the bottle-neck. It doesn’t matter how fast your protocol is (Firewire, hyper-transport, USB3, whatever) it simply has little meaning.
The mechanical hard drive can only spin so fast, it can only move the heads at a particular speed; I’ve seen large data transfers slow down to 12-25 MB/sec simply because that’s the mechanical limitation of the drive.
So, if you have a new High Definition video recorder, you are not going to transfer your 8 Gig SDD card in ~3 seconds. The Hard drive simply can’t load the data that fast; even if the USB3.0 protocol can theoretically move the data that fast.
HOwever, when we are using a Solid State Hard Drive, there is a significant performance bump where tranactions can mean that files transfer data at up to 201 MB/s.
Unless you dump your standard hard drive, and go with a SSD of suitable size, USB3.0 won’t mean a whole lot to you. IMHO, your mileage may vary.
I love the fact that this stuff just keeps getting better. I hate the fact that I have to keep paying for it. ;0)
oh joy, MORE cables to lug around.
3.0 has been a LONG time coming. 2.0 came out in 2000. That’s almost 10 years since the last revision of the interface.
I would say it’s about the right time for this, and there will be plenty of cheap USB 3.0 cards coming soon. PCI-Express needs to completely replace PCI, like PCI replaced ISA.
I might back up a couple hundred GB twice a year using USB. I start it and come back later. The increase in speed is pretty insubstantial compared to 1.0 to 2.0.
I have been very curious about USB 3.0; but I hardly expected to see product review here. Thanks
Where does SATA fit in? I'm unclear on that concept.
Why don’t people just use ethernet drives? Too expensive?
Cuz then you’d have a gigabit link.
Grossly inadequate seems a little strong. I remember constant frustration with USB 1's speed of 12 Mbps, constantly feeling like it was holding me up; with USB 2, I wouldn't say I never feel that way, but it's rare.
SATA (Serial ATA) is the newest interface for hard disks. The old PATA (Parallel ATA) hard drives used the thin ribbon connectors and only got up to around 133 MHz (300 MBps, I believe?). SATA has transfer rates up to 5 GB/s, depending on the interface revision, and generally controls internal computer devices. However, SATA connectors are increasingly common for external hard disks, as it is plug-and-play or “hot swap” depending on the industry.
They were using SATA in the example, since hard disks will usually be the best indicators for read/write performance. External USB disks have been clunky and really only good for occasional archiving. FireWire was going to revolutionize that segment, but it never took off. USB 3.0 should be able to keep up with the newest SATA disks without issue.
Now, that's kinda what I thought (I'm not really a hardware guy.) Thanks for this explanation. I get it now. Wikipedia made my head hurt. ;0)
I didn’t know that they existed.
I rarely am inconvenienced by a long transfer. The gigabit drives are pretty cool.
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