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USB 3.0 specs announced

Superspeed freed
Tuesday, 11 November 2008, 16:01

THE USB Implementers Forum will formally announce the technical specifications of the next generation of Universal Serial Bus connectivity at a conference in San Jose, California, next week.

Despite a difficult birth – hampered by infighting and political shenanigans between the big players, including Intel Nvidia and AMD – the new standard is expected to be something in the order of ten times faster than the current USB 2.0 specification.

Everything USB is reporting that a 25GB file can be transferred in just 70 seconds using the new system, compared to nearly 14 minutes for USB 2.0 and a pitifully slow (how did we ever cope?) 9.3 hours for 1.0.

That's 4.8Gb a second. Other improvements will include better power management and the use of optical cabling. µ

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Bit slow innit?

Only 10 times the speed of USB2? That's about 600MB/s. Sounds ok I suppose but then I read the bit about optical cabling and that made the figure sound even worse. Only 600MB/s over optical? The gap between USB1 and USB2 was massive. The gap between USB2 and USB3 is not impressive at all. I would have expected 6GB/s for this next generation USB3. What would save this new USB3 is built in RAID functionality so that you can plug in 4 or more drives and access them in parallel as a single drive.

posted by : BigPoppaElectronicson, 11 November 2008 Complain about this comment
You Will Not get That Speed in VISTA

Will all the DRM in Vista you`ll never gonna get 
4.8Gb a second !!!

posted by : Renato NY, 11 November 2008 Complain about this comment
new speed words

Oh great! There must be a new round of confusing fast sounding adjectives coming to describe some speed differences. Since the USB 2.0 equipment took all the really useful ones, we will be subjected to USB "Warp" speed, "Light" speed and my all time favorite from the movie Spaceballs, "Ludicrious" speed.

posted by : flash, 11 November 2008 Complain about this comment
arithmetic!!!

70 seconds divided by 25 is 2.8, not 4.8.

Geez guys! This is easy.

That should have been obvious, as the standard is 4.8 Gbit/s.

According to that, it should only transfer about 600 MB/s at best, not counting overhead.

Where are these numbers coming from?

posted by : melgross, 11 November 2008 Complain about this comment
We coped

"25GB file can be transferred in just 70 seconds using the new system, compared to nearly 14 minutes for USB 2.0 and a pitifully slow (how did we ever cope?) 9.3 hours for 1.0"

We only just had 25GB hard drives never mind 25GB files, that's how we coped :p

posted by : Andrew, 11 November 2008 Complain about this comment
4.8Gbps Speed?

25GB in 70 seconds
200Gb in 70 seconds
200/70 = 2.857 Gbps

2.857 != 4.8 ????

posted by : Adam Milne-Smith, 11 November 2008 Complain about this comment
Surly shome mistake?

"That's 4.8Gb a second", errr, No!
It's 25/70*8 = 2.86Gb (small b for bit) per second. 
In practise, USB2 gives about 1GB / min, so USB3 will be say 7 or 8 times quicker (it'll never reach it's theoretical limit) so it'll actually be 8*8/60 = 1Gb/sec.
Still pretty quick though.

posted by : Dougal, 11 November 2008 Complain about this comment
errr

Math?

posted by : chris, 11 November 2008 Complain about this comment
Plug ONE 1.0 ANYWHERE in System.

Best Equipment has to be backward compatible, by using that older equipment it then negates improvement completely, as entire system resets itself to lower top numbers.
Intel is Right, Before 3.0 becomes too over designed, set standard protocol for ALL.Its Favorable Thange'.

However, if somewhere hanging out of little noticed port, is USB 1.1, That will go for 2.0 by later 2009, with 3.0, RetroBrakes Ruin EVERYTHING ThruOut..
3.0 means Buy & Replace just about entire system. Or heck, Make Completely NEW System.Yeah, Blu Ray System.

Double Check Before you Smug & Think Ahead. 6 Back USB Ports+InsideMain+Front & Equipment Ports is lots of Speedoe needs, Don't ChimpIt.Incl 2.0 ReadyBoost.
Pure 3.0 System, Perfect For that WorkstationTransciever.
TS Drashek

posted by : When., 11 November 2008 Complain about this comment
Why so fast....

Whats the point of the huge speed increase? I mean yeah writing to if it's this fast is GREAT but when reading, your most likely reading to the HD which is much slower than 4.8GB. that's the bottle neck. But anyway yeah, faster is better.

posted by : Dan, 11 November 2008 Complain about this comment
25Gb in 70 Seconds?

Correct me if i'm wrong....but is that 360MB/s then? SSD RAID 0 anyone?

posted by : Mr X, 11 November 2008 Complain about this comment
wow

Would't it take just 7 secs instead of 70?

posted by : ty, 11 November 2008 Complain about this comment
Slipped a decimal?

35/70 = 0.48 GBs, not 4.8

posted by : Wandering, 11 November 2008 Complain about this comment
FireWire where r u?

What ever happened to firewire? Caught fire...

posted by : D, 11 November 2008 Complain about this comment
Finally

Sounds like it's time for USB monitors!

It's not full of Intel DRM, is it?

posted by : Mike Green, 11 November 2008 Complain about this comment
Very cool...

...provided that you have an Raid array of SSD drives that can push 600MB/s. I'd rather an USB 2.0 device that can actually hit it´s 480Mbps top speed.
Wireless USB wouldn´t be bad also...

posted by : Curious, 11 November 2008 Complain about this comment
yeah right

yeah right where do they get these numbers?
someones rear is probably hurting about now.
I have never gotten close to what usb 2.0 is supposed to. Its another wi-fi speed rating vs real world. Or worse like sata I and II that didn't do anything for real speed, instead got people to buy into the hype of 150/mbs and 300/mbs. Instead of focusing on the features that are actually useful. i know they have to make head room for the future, but don't brag about it if you aint got it. And we all know how many hard drives can break that speed limit, but yet have a huge stickers that say SATA II 300/mbs.

posted by : missingxtension, 12 November 2008 Complain about this comment
4.8Gb a second

Not off a mechanical hard drive...

posted by : Greg, 12 November 2008 Complain about this comment
Brilliant....not

a 25GB file can be transferred in just 70 seconds ....That's 4.8Gb a second

Wow! where did you learn math 

posted by : Alain M, 12 November 2008 Complain about this comment
What's the point of it?

Can someone please explain to me why we need firewire, sata and usb3? Surely we only need one of them and as sata is more than quick enough already, why don't they just ditch the others and save some interrupts?

posted by : Fred, 12 November 2008 Complain about this comment
Power capabilities

For those who travel, carrying several "bricks"(power adapters) ..for a notebook, printer, scanner, camera, etc ... is the real pain .... so beefed power capabilities of USB 3.0 might be a real advantage ........ if sufficient for multiple peripherals .......

posted by : kwv, 12 November 2008 Complain about this comment
WHEN will it be available

So, please be so kind and do your homework and then tell us, WHEN this will be available to the masses?!
After all that date is all what counts, isn't it?

posted by : Andy, 12 November 2008 Complain about this comment
oo-er

At last, this will end the question of why we cant get cheap HD webcams (with that kind of proposed bandwidth the image can be read off the imager and squirted into the PC without external compression hardware). The only remaining question is why one would want such resolution... 

oo-er

posted by : Steve, 12 November 2008 Complain about this comment
Just once, please

Can we get the units right?

http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/units.html
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/prefixes.html

And here you find the "b" (barn)
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/outside.html

BTW, the "K" stands for "kelvin", not "kilo" (that would be "k").

Dammit!

posted by : www.metric4us.com, 12 November 2008 Complain about this comment
No, it doesn't & 300MB/s

Plugging a USB1 peripheral into a USB2 hub does not affect the other USB2 hub ports, nor it's upstream link. As a matter of fact, a common workaround for a USB1 problem is "plug it in on a hub".
Plugging a USB1 peripheral into a host's USB2 port doesn't cause the other host ports to not be USB2.
Not sure where you are getting your info.
And by the way - the 480Mb/s USB2 interface provided me 40MB/s average speed to my hard drives, as did my Firewire400 to the same drives (dual interface). On USB3, I expect the overhead to have gone up, and I expect about 300MB/s of throughput. The overhead related to error correction is higher. I expect this on copper. Optical is cool, but I don't think it is required - simply an option that some might find useful.
Have a quiet day.

posted by : AntiDrashek, 13 November 2008 Complain about this comment
Capilliary tube

The USB 3 device sends lightning fast data to the USB3 controller on the motherboard, which transfers the lightning fast data across the local bus to the hard disk controller, which takes that huge torrent of data, and pisses it down the capilliary tube to the hard disk, rather like the M25 suddenly ending at a set of traffic lights onto a single track road.

I can hardly contain my excitement......zzzZZZ

yawn....

It will make cock all difference....

When Vista comes out of sleep it can't even decide that my USB 2 hub is actually USB 2, it says "this device can perform faster" in petulant kind of way. XP doesn't have any problems, so USB 3 is obviously lining up to allow Windows 7 to say the same about USB3 controllers thinking they are USB 2.

Now why couldn't Microsoft have been a bank, say just like Lehman brothers....





posted by : 99flake, 22 November 2008 Complain about this comment
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