The world better be ready for
SuperSpeed USB 3.0, cause
it's coming, baby -- and by the looks of things at IDF, it's coming soon. Intel's "USB Community" pavilion is filled with SuperSpeed tech from a variety of companies, and while some of the demos are happening on
crazy Frankenstein rigs, there's a bunch of stuff here that's basically ready to ship, including controller chips from
NEC and Fujitsu, which are the heart of the whole shebang. Of course, while lightning-fast SSD transfers are nice, the showiest product on the floor is
Point Grey's prototype HD camera here, which streams uncompressed 1080p video over USB 3.0 -- it's not a final product, but it's apparently quite close. Yes, we know the gallery below is basically cable porn, but here are the facts: USB 3.0 is 10x faster than 2.0 while using less power, and it's entirely backwards-compatible, since the five 3.0 pins in the connector have been cleverly engineered to
sit above the four legacy 2.0 pins. If that doesn't get you dreaming of hard drives for the holidays, well, we don't know what will. Video after the break!
posted Sep 23rd 2009 12:07PM
"USB 3.0 is 10x faster than 2.0 while using less power, and it's entirely backwards-compatible"
I love technology.
yes I'm long overdue for a new PC build and i have been holding out for this...ASUS lets bang out some boards with usb 3.0 host controllers SOON please :D
Yeah. Not only it is faster it also incorporated the new security mechanism that
prevents a thief like Palm to steal vendor ID.
LOL, applefanboy confirmed
Palm's "stealing" of the vendor ID is only a positive as it gives consumers more options.
Security is a big deal in this age of vendor identity theft. It is a serious
criminal offense, IMO.
'josh' and his jokes, so subtle you can hardly tell he's joking.
do we see a skulltrail - lucid Hydra - usb3.0 - SATA 6gb mobo coming in the near future?
^.^
All hail USB 3.0, our new over lord
USB is going to be like me when it's released.
Coming fast.
ummm actually, that's not a good thing....
your picture is appropriate.
What you did there, I see it.
The fact that I can transfer 900 GB of data in 2.1 hours based on those results stands as a testament to what we can look forward to. Now let's crank up the speed on those hard drives.
TURN IT UP TO 11!!!
I assume this means there are male-male adapters, and female-female adapters for USB 3.0?
Are you calling USB 3.0...
um...
...Gay?
It's coming out, right?
:P
For a product with such a stupid name it has to be one of the products I want most right now. That speed is crazy.
Wow, not that fast imo.
Look at the video at 0:52, the top one is copying from the SSD to the Local disk while the bottom one is copying to a flashdrive.
Of course copying to the C drive(harddrive) is faster than copying to a flash drive.
Just curious... what does it take to make an interface this fast? It's just electrons flowing through copper, right?
Is it the extra pins that make it faster? Why couldn't they get USB 3.0 speeds long ago?
I have no idea how this stuff works... but I know some of you do...
It's not so much making things faster as making things faster while still being affordable.
Here's way more than you'll EVER wanna know:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usb (scroll waaaaay down to get to the 3.0 goodness)
Ain't technology grand? :)
"USB 3.0 achieves the much higher performance by way of a number of technical changes. Perhaps the most obvious change is an additional physical bus that is added in parallel with the existing USB 2.0 bus. This means that where USB 2.0 previously had 4 wires (power, ground, and a pair for differential data), USB 3.0 adds 4 more for two pairs of differential signals (receive and transmit) for a combined total of 8 connections in the connectors and cabling. These extra two pairs were necessary to support the SuperSpeed USB target bandwidth requirements, because the two wire differential signals of USB 2.0 were not enough.
Furthermore, the signaling method, while still host-directed, is now asynchronous instead of polling. USB 3.0 utilizes a bi-directional data interface rather than USB 2.0's half-duplex arrangement, where data can only flow in one direction at a time. Without getting into any more technical mumbo jumbo, this all combines to give a ten-fold increase in theoretical bandwidth, and a welcome improvement noticeable by anyone when SuperSpeed USB products hit the market."
http://www.everythingusb.com/superspeed-usb.html
Basically USB runs in some fundamentally different, more efficient ways than USB 2 did. So it's not like they just 'sped up' USB 2.0. To put it in car terms USB 1 -> 2 was like taking a 4-banger and throwing a supercharger on it. USB 2 -> 3 is more like trading in your 4 cylinder econobox for V8 sportster. The backward compatibility really is possible because there just happens to be enough room in the plugs to put the same old 4/5 pin arrangement from the old standard along with all the pins for the new standard. They won't both be used all at the same time.
If I'm wrong somewhere in there, please correct me...
I guess its not really speed they've increased, its bandwidth. MB/s isn't a measure of speed, its a measure of flow rate (I think...). As opposed to increasing the speed on the highway, you're just whacking on a few more lanes.
I think it is the fact that USB 3.0 uses fibre-optic cables instead of copper which transfer data siginificantly faster as it uses light which travels at 300,000m/s
300,000,000 m/s
Actually it travels a bit less than 3E8m/s because of the refractive index of the fiber, which, depending on the wavelength that they are running at, is probably around 1.4. So divide 3E8/1.4 to get the approximate speed.
Which is of course the same speed as the propagation of electromagnetic waves ;)
299,792,458 metres per second actually.
USB 3.0 can use a fiber optic cable but most use plain old copper.
does nybody know if i will be able to swap out a usb 2 cable on an external harddrive for a usb 3 cable to get faster speeds when this is released? or are usb devices limited to just usb 2 speeds, i.e is the speed of data transfer a physical thing and not due to the cable/connection, if so i would buy a usb 3.0 pci card otherwise im not sure if its that useful at the moment for me
USB 3.0 needs a USB 3 device>USB 3 cable>USB 3 port & controller.
But you could just buy a new USB 3 enclosure for your hard drive and swap it over.....
Any here hear an echo?
http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/19/point-grey-puts-usb-3-0-into-a-webcam-along-with-other-telltale/
Dell, Are you getting USB 3.0 into your XPS desktop motherboards by November/December?
lol, dell, lol.
Hey, can you guys try to grab some video samples from that USB 3.0 1080p60 webcam? I'm really interested in seeing the quality of the image on this thing...
USB 3.0 sure will become very helpful
anyone know what software they are using to clock the speed of transfer in the video??
Trust :)
You know who is going to be the first to jump on this and make money from it is the porn industry.
With what? USB 3.0 s3x toys?
Cause ISPs certainly wont deal w/ all that uncompressed uploads.
Now I can see my Girlfriend panties in 1080p!