The daisy's for simplicity and unaffected air - Robert Burns
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USB 3.0 hard drives start to flood market
STORAGE HARDWARE MAKERS Iomega and Verbatim are two of the latest vendors to look to the future with hard drives offering Superspeed USB 3.0 support.
Iomega, part of storage giant EMC, is offering a portable hard drive, coming in with 500GB of storage but most importantly offering USB 3.0 transfer speed. It is also offering a desktop hard drive in 1TB and 2TB capacities that also uses USB 3.0.
Verbatim followed this up with virtually the same kind of thing- a portable hard drive with USB 3.0, but you can also get a 1TB version in black as well as a 500GB silver device. Iomega is also offering 1TB and 2TB desktop hard drives.
Pushing these devices to people who want things done quickly, the companies say that these types of drives offer bus speeds of up to 4.8Gbit/sec, a ten-fold increase in performance. They are also backwards compatible, so there's no danger of making the devices you have that work with USB 2.0 redundant.
But it will take a while for current devices such as laptops with slower internal hard drives to cope with USB 3.0, which could hold back its use for a while. However if you do have a PC and you are looking to transfer data in bulk, one of these things might be well worth a look. µ
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I'd appreciate USB3.0 connectors (two) on the drives themselves for data and power. I'm just one of those people who would put a silicon skin over the drop for fall protection, but connect it to a PC or laptop with the one USB 3.0 cable (if there is enough power).
Just look over at Newegg. Lots of USB3 motherboards. Both AMD and Intel.
As for Firewire, Apple and the other patent holders charged their "tax" so long it paved the way for USB's royalty free market penetration and current dominance. Talk about too little too late...
@George
Bus power is measured in mA, not mW and is 150 mA for unconfigured devices and a max of 900mA for configured devices. the configured/unconfigured refers to the software (IE drivers). This is an increase from USB2, which had no problems with power. Most USB2 ports could power 2.5" mobile hard drives and 3.5" drives had their own power. So where is the problem? And again, Firewire can have all the extra power it wants, Apple, Sony and the other developers shot it in the foot with the royalty they charged for so long.
Still waiting on chipsets and MB makers to fully support USB3.0
FireWire 3200 was announced but haven't seen products.
FireWire was good that you could supply 30v and 1.5A so you could easily run an audio interface, scanner or many others devices without a plug pack.
I am waiting for it to appear. Even if HDD do not max it out (which is good) it will boost their transfer speed as USB2 is a bottleneck these days.
USB 3.0 is rubbish. Too little too late. And it still provides far to little bus power. Only 750 mw? You can't be serious. Firewire has provided more than twice that amount of bus power, for a decade now. USB is for keyboards and mice. Not for hard drives.
Just because they are USB 3.0 does not mean we will see anything close to 4.8Gbit/sec worth of transfers from the hard drives. Some of the fastest SSDs out are barely hitting transfer rates of 270Mb/sec. So I think it will be a few years before this interface becomes saturated from a hard drive.