SuperSpeed USB 3.0 Demoed

Terry Olaes

Terry Olaes

I Used to be the [H] News Guy
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Nov 27, 2006
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Symwave is at CES in Las Vegas to demo the SuperSpeed USB 3.0 transfer capabilities on external HDDs. They were showing off their stuff and Engadget was there with a video camera to catch it. Intriguing.
 
Speed is good and all, but I'd like to see USB being able to provide 12 volt power. As it is, there's no reason for me to use it over eSATA for my external 3.5 hard drives since I still have to plug in external power.
 
When do the USB 3.0 enabled boards come out is my question. I've got an old computer, and I don't want to upgrade if 3.0 is just around the corner. Had that happen with this one.
 
Jack Hammer said:
When do the USB 3.0 enabled boards come out is my question. I've got an old computer, and I don't want to upgrade if 3.0 is just around the corner. Had that happen with this one.
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I wouldn't worry about it. Adding in a USB card is one of the simplest upgrades you can do. It's not a new CPU where you might have to replace your entire platform.
 
rflcptr said:
Actually, he said "Three Dot Oh."

:p
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I had a hard time getting through the video without trying to reach through my LCD and choking this guy! Just say "USB 3", not "USB Three Dot Oh". Hell, why don't you pad your speech further and say "Universal Serial Bus Three Dot Oh"?
 
SockMan! said:
Speed is good and all, but I'd like to see USB being able to provide 12 volt power. As it is, there's no reason for me to use it over eSATA for my external 3.5 hard drives since I still have to plug in external power.
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In a few years when it becoems mainstreamish we'll all be using SSDs making it a moot point.
 
Silly display. Demoing a 500MBs technology through a PCI bus (133MBs) to a regular HDD (~80MBs.) If you're going to show off a technology that's ~10 times as fast as the old one, don't use a demo that cripples the potential performance.
 
hughJ said:
Silly display. Demoing a 500MBs technology through a PCI bus (133MBs) to a regular HDD (~80MBs.) If you're going to show off a technology that's ~10 times as fast as the old one, don't use a demo that cripples the potential performance.
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Yeah I was also like "PCI? do they mean PCIe?" But it DID show we weren't limited by the interface... so as hard drive transfer rates improve we'll see USB 3 stretching it's legs.
 
Did anyone else notice he gave two different numbers for the max speed? First he said 500MBps, then at the very end he that it will operate at 5Gbps. Which would actually then be closer to 600MBps (just a tad over 596MBps).
 
Wait 'till the end of the video, and look at the guy.

Similar?
tf2spyat9.png
 
I Wonder if there will be any hope for older laptops and USB 3....Maybe some type of card or something hopefully!
 
USB2, 480Mb/s
USB3, 5Gb/s

The hdd in the video is 80MB/s or about 640Mb/s ... at least it's exceeding USB2 speeds!
 
Exavior said:
Did anyone else notice he gave two different numbers for the max speed? First he said 500MBps, then at the very end he that it will operate at 5Gbps. Which would actually then be closer to 600MBps (just a tad over 596MBps).
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It probably uses 8b/10b encoding, which comes out to 500MB/s (476 binary)
 
PCI (pccard) is 133MBbyte/sec, PCIe1.0 1x (express card) is 250MB/sec. PCIe2.0 1x is 500MB/sec. It'll probably be available but not at full speed with addon cards, OTOH very few devices will be able to saturate the bus.
 
^^ what he said

Yea, PCI is slow and all, but what your compy can do is decided by the weakest link, and USB3 wont be the weakest link, your HDD will. We will see PCIe cards very soon, well before anything actually causes a problem with PCI, and next thing you know well all have these on board, and this will happen much faster than development on a device that will exceed these specs will
 
I don't have any idea how long till the mainstream, but IIRC the fastest SSD's are already around 300MB/sec.
 
SockMan! said:
Speed is good and all, but I'd like to see USB being able to provide 12 volt power. As it is, there's no reason for me to use it over eSATA for my external 3.5 hard drives since I still have to plug in external power.
Click to expand...

Just thinking the same!


falconman said:
I Wonder if there will be any hope for older laptops and USB 3....Maybe some type of card or something hopefully!
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PCMI what ever slots sure, most likely.
 
SockMan! said:
I wouldn't worry about it. Adding in a USB card is one of the simplest upgrades you can do. It's not a new CPU where you might have to replace your entire platform.
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Unless it's a laptop. Then you either have to or have to tie-up a precious expansion slot.
 
Why did they not have it hooked up to a RAID setup so they could push higher bandwidth?
 
His face at the end finishes the sentence:

"You're welcome, Paul.... but now I'm going to have to kill you".
 
SockMan! said:
Speed is good and all, but I'd like to see USB being able to provide 12 volt power. As it is, there's no reason for me to use it over eSATA for my external 3.5 hard drives since I still have to plug in external power.
Click to expand...

I'm with you on this one. Oh hell, I'll go even further, I wish all devices were either 12v/24v period. Done. End of story. Get rid of 3v, 3.3v, 5v, 9v, and so one. Uniform voltages across as many device chains as possible.
 
mr007 said:
will this ever be onboard a newer motherboards?
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I don't see why it wouldn't be. It will probably be like 2.0. Newer motherboards will have it onboard with those with older boards having to get card(pci or pci-e or whatever they make it) to use it.
 
Almost certainly PCIe by the time it comes out. Already about 1/3rd of the assorted port adder cards on newegg are PCIe, and that's despite this type of card having such a long lifetime that there're actually still ISA cards listed for sale. :eek:
 
In the demo they're probably using a prototype that isn't fully capable of the speed yet, so they didn't get a raid setup with the higher bandwidth (the final standard was just finished, afterall).
 
Phantoms said:
One end is the same, the other end different.
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They're all are different since USB 3.0 uses five new signals that aren't in USB 1.x and 2.0. But like I said, USB 3.0 equipped systems are compatible with USB2.0 devices since all 2.0 plugs will work with all 3.0 recepticles (the reverse isn't true for type B plugs though).
 
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