USB 3.0 and its Advantages

USB 3.0 and its Advantages

USB 3.0 and its Advantages

USB 3 is finally out on the street. Since USB connections to external hard drives for backup are very common, this offers a huge improvement in speeding up the transfer. But as usual, there are a few caveats for being on the leading edge of technology. The USB 3 was a big hit at the CES show in January of this year.

USB 2 has a speed rating of 480 mBits/s, which means about 57 megabytes per second. But those are mystical numbers since most users are lucky to get 25 megabytes per second and even that is dependent on file size. The new USB 3 is rated at 4.8 Gbit/s or 570 megabytes per second but that too is far beyond the real speeds we got during testing. Once again it's very dependent on file size and type but we did manage to hit 58 megabytes per second in a few tests.

So in the real world out tests showed at least a doubling of speed and often half the time to copy the same amount of data. In some cases where there were a lot of bigger files (1 GB or above) we did get bursts of over 80 megabytes per second but that was the exception to the average copy speed. But I'll take a 50% increase in speed and often a third of the time to copy files any day of the week.

Moving around large and dense files like graphics or music will see a very big improvement. Video cameras and music devices will get a big improvement in moving files to a computer. Server class machines and large workstations designed for AutoCad, video editing, and music will certainly get a big boost from the new USB 3 speeds.

Moving my music collection around has always been a huge pain. I have over 55 GBs of music and waiting for it to copy is intolerable. Or doing a complete fresh back up of my main workstation with over 120 GBs can be about as much fun as watching paint dry. In testing the new USB 3 I got a huge improvement over both tasks and dropped the time well over two thirds which is a big improvement.

Now for the not so good news about USB 3: they changed the connector side that goes to the device so all your existing USB 2 devices will never see the new speeds. And as far as I could find right now, there are only a few flash drives and external hard drives that are fully USB 3 compliant. And this also means you'll need the new USB 3 cable to connect with any new device.

One issue with current and older motherboards is that they may be limited by their bus interface speeds. The PCI Generation 1.0 is limited to 2.5 GB transfer rate so it doesn't matter how fast any connection is beyond that limit. And the new standard for USB 3 is a minimum of a 5 GB transfer rate to be certified. You will see an increase in speed but never achieve the maximum transfer rate with these older models.

And you won't see USB 3 offered in many new computers yet. There are a couple of forward thinking companies like Startech who sell a PCI board with USB 3 connections for about $50. And some computer companies are slowly adding USB 3 to their newest computer models. This is especially important for laptop users since the only way now to upgrade is to use a media card adapter.

Both HP and Fujitsu announced that they would be offering USB 3 on their new laptop computers. Western Digital was first out of the gate with a new version of My Book 3.0 external hard drive that also comes with a USB 3 PCI adapter in a bundle deal. Seagate has indicated it will offer similar external hard drives by mid summer 2010. And flash drive maker Super Talent is offering a 16 GB flash drive that is USB 3 compliant.

So if you want to speed up your file and data transfers, USB 3 will certainly provide some real world improvements in transfer speed. And when the new computers catch up and offer USB 3, and the all the device manufacturers get the new USB 3 compliant models in the supply line, it will quickly become the new standard.

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