• Hardware

  • USB 3.0 - Underrated and Unappreciated

Perhaps not by everyone but definitely by me.

Got myself a nice Kingston USB 3.0 16GB stick and I was so happy with the performance.

Write Speed - 30MB/s
Read Speed - 70MB/s
Well...not everyone has USB 3.0 yet, and the people owning them don't know how fast they work.
AvoK95 wroteWell...not everyone has USB 3.0 yet, and the people owning them don't know how fast they work.
What's nice is that you can plug it anywhere until you get USB3.0 ports. It's practical. Unlike some other ports.
I mean, where can you plug a thunderbolt drive if you don't have a thunderbolt port. And the port is so uncommon that most people have ever seen it.
The only problem I have with USB is that I can never plug it correctly without flipping it 5 to 6 times.
peekaie wrote
AvoK95 wroteWell...not everyone has USB 3.0 yet, and the people owning them don't know how fast they work.
What's nice is that you can plug it anywhere until you get USB3.0 ports. It's practical. Unlike some other ports.
I mean, where can you plug a thunderbolt drive if you don't have a thunderbolt port. And the port is so uncommon that most people have ever seen it.
That's true.
Out of 300 PC's only one of them would have thunderbolt.
Even Thunderbolt devices aren't common in Lebanon. You can barley find Firewire.
solo220 wrotewhat about price ?
What about it ?
A USB 3.0 Card costs 30$ , and USB 3.0 devices cost the same as any USB 2.0 device.
@Xterm, have you experienced the full speed and not liked it or what?
There is something else...even USB3.0 devices run faster on USB2.0 than USB2.0 devices themselves (though not by much) due to the more powerful controllers found in USB3.0 devices. Add to that the fact that USB3.0 is full-duplex (meaning you can transfer data both ways simultaneously, very important for external HDDs), and that it can theoretically reach 4.8gbit/s speeds (let's assume half of that, as with USB2.0, we would get 300MB/s). And now, external SSDs are indeed possible. With 128GB and 256GB SSDs getting cheaper, and 512GB being readily introduced, I believe we are at a very important turning point with external storage. No more waiting for files like before.

xterm, check out the 128GB Magnum USB flash drive. And tell me what you think.

@solo220: Yes, if you mean the USB flash drive, yes it's available. Along with others like the Transcend Transflash USB flash drives, which are also USB3.0, and I'm guessing several others too.

http://www.pcandparts.com is where I can find such USB flash drives. I have the 16GB Transcend Transflash and I am very satisfied with its performance. Rated at 70MB/s read and 20MB/s write. Somewhat achieves those (especially the read). With write, you have to have contiguous files. Else transfer rates with suffer, which is a characteristic of all flash technology nowadays.
AvoK95 wroteThat's true.
Out of 300 PC's only one of them would have thunderbolt.
Even Thunderbolt devices aren't common in Lebanon. You can barley find Firewire.
Thunderbolt is not made for portable storage. It is a professional level of storage port built for super fast I/O speed. You'll find thunderbolt in new macbook pro, imacs, and mac pro. Storage drives that support thunderbolt are manufactured by "Promise", a high end manufacturer of SAN and NAS storage drives. All of this is mostly to support video editing companies that use Final Cut Pro. While fibre channel maxs out at 4Gb/s, thunderbolt goes up to 10Gb/s. USB 3.0 got nothing on thunderbolt.