Technology Blog

From my perspective, one of the most important and most overlooked trends at CES was the emergence of name-brand external drives that support the USB 3.0 or "Superspeed" specification. Effectively, this is a connection protocol that looks just like the USB 2.0 connections we're all familiar with, but it should let you transfer data to and from external drives three times faster than you can with USB 2.0 drives.
Technically, USB 3.0 runs at 5 gigabits per second, compared with USB 2.0's 480 megabits per second, so you would think it would be 10 times faster. But remember that those speeds are theoretical maximums, not what you see in the real world, because of the overhead in the way the protocol works. More important, when it comes to hard drives, the connection is no longer going to be the limit. The raw speed of the drive--how fast the platters rotate and how quickly the drive itself can read and write data--is going to be the limiting factor.






The USB Implementers Forum  has been working on USB 3.0 for years. I've been seeing demos of USB 3.0 for about a year and a half now, and the first few real products, mostly controllers and adapters, were heavily on display at last summer's Intel Developer Forum.
What was different at CES was the appearance of three USB 3.0 hard drives that should be available to consumers imminently.
For desktops, Western Digital showed a version of its MyBook,initially in a 1-terabyte version (with a 2TB version coming soon). This is a 3.5-inch drive, and it will be available for $179.99 by itself or $199.99 with a USB 3.0 PCIe adapter card. And Buffalo Technologies introduced a version of its DriveStation desktop drive at $199.99 for the 1TB version, $249.99 for the 1.5TB version, and $399.99 for 2TB. It will require a $59.99 Express Card adapter.
For laptops, Seagate showed a version of its business notebook drive, called the Black Armor PS110. This 500GB, 7,200-rpm drive comes with an Express Card USB 3.0 adapter for $179.99. The drive comes with AES 256-bit encryption. The company showed demos of the same drive attached via USB 2.0 showing reads at 32 MBps and writes at 24 MBps versus connected at a USB 3.0 showing reads at 100 MBps and writes at 67 MBps. They even showed a two-drive system using RAID 0 connected to USB 3.0 showing 217 MBps throughput.  (Notes this works out to about 1.6 gigabits per second or about one-fourth of USB 3.0's rated speed.)
You'll note that these speeds are nowhere near the 5-Gbps speed that USB 3.0 is rated at. Again, that's because the drives themselves have become the gate. But it means that USB 3.0 should be fast enough so that FireWire or even eSata connections become irrelevant in the future. (eSata connections are also faster than current drives, but there are many more USB devices. It's possible there will be eSATA versions of the coming SATA 6GB standard, though that's mostly aimed at RAID configurations, where it will be quite useful.)
USB 3.0 is backward-compatible, so you can plug a USB 2.0 device into a USB 3.0 port or a USB 3.0 drive into a USB 2.0 port--though of course, you'll then get only the slower performance.  But the real problem now is a lack of USB 3.0 ports: Yes, you can buy a PCIe board for your desktop or an express card for your laptop (assuming you have the slot), but that's really only a solution for one machine. In the long run, we want machines that have USB 3.0 standard, and that won't really become commonplace until AMD and Intel build support into their chipsets, something neither has done yet.
Still, it's really important because we all are getting more and more content, and backing it up is taking longer and longer. Taking the Seagate demo numbers, for instance, note that backing up 100GB of photos (a not unreasonable amount these days) would take about 71 minutes on a USB 2.0 drive and about 25 minutes on a USB 3.0 drive. That's still longer than I would like, but it's a big step in the right direction. And a 3X gain is a lot bigger difference than you'll see with a change of processor, or in most cases, a change of graphics chips.


(from internet)