Posts Tagged USB 3
USB 3.0 Is Finally Rolling Out
Posted by Goldy in Computer Hardware on September 1st, 2010
USB 3 is now out on the street. Because USB connections to external hard drives for backup are quite popular, this offers a large advance in speeding up the transfer. However as usual, you will find a couple of caveats for getting on the cutting edge of technology. The USB 3 was a big hit in the CES show in January of this year.
USB 2 offers a speed rating of 480 mBits/s, which implies about 57 megabytes per second. But those are mystical numbers considering that a lot of users are fortunate to get 25 megabytes a second and even that may be dependent on file size. The brand new USB 3 is rated at 4.8 Gbit/s or 570 megabytes a second but that too is way beyond the genuine speeds we got through testing. Yet again it’s very dependent on file size and type but we did manage to reach 58 megabytes per second in a couple of tests.
So in the actual world our tests demonstrated at the very least a doubling of speed and usually half the time span to copy the identical amount of data. In some cases where there were many bigger files (1 GB or higher) we did get bursts of in excess of 80 megabytes per second although that was the exception to the average copy speed. Nevertheless I’ll take a 50% increase in speed and generally a third of the time to copy files just about any day of the week.
Moving around large and dense files like graphics or music will get a rather major enhancement. Video cameras and music devices will receive a large increase in moving data to a computer. Server class equipment and big workstations designed for AutoCad, video editing, and music will without doubt get a large increase from the brand new USB 3 speeds.
Transferring my personal music collection around has usually been a great pain. I have more than 55 GBs of music and waiting around for it to copy is intolerable. Or performing a total fresh back up of my main workstation with more than 120 GBs may be about as much fun as watching paint dry. In testing the new USB 3 I obtained a big enhancement over both tasks and lowered the time well above two thirds which is really a large improvement.
Now for the not so great news with regards to USB 3: they altered the connector part that goes to the device thus all your existing USB 2 devices will by no means see the brand new speeds. And as far as I could find at the moment, there are just a handful of flash drives and external hard drives which are completely USB 3 compliant. And this in addition implies you’ll require the brand new USB 3 cable to hook up with any new device.
A particular difficulty with current and old motherboards is that they may be limited by their particular bus interface speeds. The PCI Generation 1.0 is limited to 2.5 GB transfer rate so it doesn’t matter how quick any connection is above that restriction. And also the new norm for USB 3 is a minimum of a 5 GB transfer rate to be authorized. You’ll observe an improvement in speed but never obtain the maximum transfer rate with these older models.
And you won’t observe USB 3 offered in many new computer systems yet. You can find a couple of forward thinking corporations like Startech who sell a PCI board having USB 3 connections for around $50. And some personal computer businesses are gradually adding USB 3 to their latest computer models. This is especially crucial for laptop users considering that the one way now to upgrade is to use a media card adapter.
Both HP and Fujitsu publicized that they would be providing USB 3 on their brand new laptop computer systems. Western Digital was the very first out of the gate with a new model of My Book 3.0 external hard drive that additionally is available with a USB 3 PCI adapter in a package deal. Seagate has suggested it’ll provide similar external hard drives by middle of the summer 2010. And flash drive manufacturer Super Talent is featuring a 16 GB flash drive that is USB 3 compliant.
So in case you want to speed up your file and data transfers, USB 3 will certainly supply some real world advancements in transfer rate. And when the new computer systems catch up and provide USB 3, and most of the device makers get the brand new USB 3 compliant versions inside the supply line, it will rapidly become the newest standard.
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USB 3 - Is This The Death Of Firewire?
Posted by Goldy in Uncategorized on June 17th, 2009
If you have been around for more than a few years then undoubtedly you will remember the frustratingly painful floppy drives that used to be the only way to effectively transfer files between computers. Frustrating of course because often the floppy would not write or even more frustratingly would not read on the donor machine.
Also the USB 1.0 format was relatively new back in the day, devices that took advantage of the technology were relatively thin on the ground so if you were really lucky you did not have to get involved with larger files that often required spanning across many disks which was even more fraught with frustrastion.
But as computing power grew at a fast pace the size of files seemed to grow exponentially and the floppy drive was simply not up to the job meaning many people were left having to burn very expensive CD’s as burning technology came into play in the nick of time.
USB was making rapid gains fortunately and manufacturers were coming up with many new uses for this very user friendly (operating system permitting) plug and play capability, and the pen drive was borne not a moment to soon in my opinion. Mobile data transfer capacity rocketed upwards from a humble 2mb and it did not seem too long until the capacity of USB pen drives surpassed that of the CD.
The IT support and IT industries where some of the first serious adopters of pen drives primarily due to the fact that system tools could be easily carried on a flash drive and with the larger capacities reduced the need to carry around a number of CD disks used for diagnostics or computer maintenance utilities.
Increased capacities then drove the need for higher data transfer speeds and it was not long before USB 2.0 and then Hi-speed USB appeared and filled the need for speed
There was of course a lot of confusion between USB 2 and Hi speed USB at the time, which could transfer data at an astonishing 480mbps per second but a lot of early adopters were left more than a tad upset as industry often sold devices and PCI cards as USB 2.0 but in reality they were only USB 2.0 compliant and still had a much slower transfer speed.
The USB interface and standard is now nicely matured and USB interfaces are common across a range of consumer devices from phones to cameras and even video players although it was and still is to a degree questionable as to whether USB or Firewire would win the day as the dominant data transfer protocol.
The USB pen drive has really risen to the challenge to take advantage of the USB interface and storage capacities are enormous and far beyond most peoples requirements, What were almost in the beginning icons of your technical prowess have now become a mainstream device and sales are said to exceed 150 million units per year just for pen drives alone. The USB interface is also said to be present in over 6 billion consumers devices and this number is growing at over 30% per annum.
Increases in drive capacities has raised a number of issues across many industry sectors including the data recovery industry, which has had to evolve new USB memory recovery techniques for recovering data from these flash based devices.
It is so easy to transfer and store data on these devices that many users are really taking them for granted and not saving their data elsewhere, which is all well and good until your drive breaks or gets damaged, or perhaps the memory controller fails.
Some Data recovery companies have of course stepped up the mark and the USB recovery industry is now alive and well.
Another issue these devices have highlighted is the need for security as sensitive data (business or personal) can be quickly and easily stolen from the source. Technology has answered the problem and secure pen drives are now available and manufacturing giant Fujitsu has continued its innovation in security with the invention of a smart USB drives which even have the ability to auto erase data on a USB memory device.
As it seems with all technology every development brings us even greater speed and the new USB 3.0 standard is no exception promising data transfer speed 10x greater than current specs which will give us transfer speeds around 5Gbps.
This very fast transfer speed may of course signal the end of the older firewire standard which has been falling behind more recently.
USB 3.0 standards have been ratified and the first devices are expected to be available towards the end of the year and it will also be interesting to see if Windows 7 ready boost feature will be able to increase the operating systems performance far greater than is apparent in Windows Vista.