Is USB 3 a failure?

[premier69]

I was just thinking,... my current PC doesn't have USB 3 but my new will (as soon as they release the P67 motherboards after the recall)

And i wanted to buy an external HDD docking station because i store a lot of tv and movies on drives and put them away until i want to watch something on them, this to limit wear and tear since data loss would mean re downloading a few terabytes.

I was thinking of buying this: https://oxyt.strefazysku.pl/index.p..._ST050#nclid=7263141d4139e5df10e4199ec35092c5

I have never used the eSATA would it be a good alternative to usb3?

It seems that no one has USB 3, it also seems very expensive and i'm reading from time to time about newer up and coming standards supposed to be better, so my question is: is usb 3 a failure as an standard? and if so why?

 

[cloud8521]

I have USb3, with a usb 3 hard drive. (the connectors in it are sata 2 tho, hard drive is sata 3)

and i get 130MB/s average with it

 

[alphanumeric]

If you could actually find hardware that could operate at or near the speed of the USB 3 bus it might be worth having. As far as external storage goes, if it has a mechanical (platter and heads) hard drive in it, it won't come even remotely close. They don't even come close to USB 2 speeds at the moment. Even with a solid state drive I don't think you'll come close to maxing out the USB 2 bus speed. Personally if I had an eSATA port on my PC I'd use that before spending any money on adding USB 3 to my current PC. Also if I had to chose between adding a USB 3 card or an eSATA card, I'd go with eSATA. But I have hardware that could use eSATA and don't have anything with USB 3. I don't think its a failure yet, its too new and too early yet to pass judgment.

 

[WDAexodus]

If you could actually find hardware that could operate at or near the speed of the USB 3 bus it might be worth having. As far as external storage goes, if it has a mechanical (platter and heads) hard drive in it, it won't come even remotely close. They don't even come close to USB 2 speeds at the moment. Even with a solid state drive I don't think you'll come close to maxing out the USB 2 bus speed. Personally if I had an eSATA port on my PC I'd use that before spending any money on adding USB 3 to my current PC. Also if I had to chose between adding a USB 3 card or an eSATA card, I'd go with eSATA. But I have hardware that could use eSATA and don't have anything with USB 3. I don't think its a failure yet, its too new and too early yet to pass judgment.

+1 Premiere, There are mobo's with USB 3.0 other than the P67's but get that you are waiting for the P67's to be re-released.

 

[pparks1]

I currently use e-SATA and plan to stick with that for quite some time. It works just fine for me.

 

[Maguscreed]

Yeah isn't usb 2.0 at around 480 meg/sec cap?
Never seen anything near that on a hdd anyhow.

 

[whs]

If you could actually find hardware that could operate at or near the speed of the USB 3 bus it might be worth having

What kind of hardware would that be? Even a "normal" SSD cannot feed at 5Mb/sec.

As far as external storage goes, if it has a mechanical (platter and heads) hard drive in it, it won't come even remotely close. They don't even come close to USB 2 speeds at the moment. Even with a solid state drive I don't think you'll come close to maxing out the USB 2 bus speed

Spinning disks can feed up tp 100MB/sec. That is about 2x the speed of USB2. SSDs go up to 350MB/sec which is appr. 7xUSB2 speed. And USB3 is appr. 12xUSB2.

Yeah isn't usb 2.0 at around 480 meg/sec cap?
Never seen anything near that on a hdd anyhow.

That is 480 Mega Bits. The disk speeds are normally quoted in Mega Bytes which is appr. 10x the MegaBits. Any better spinning disk is faster than USB2.

 

[Maguscreed]

That would be roughly a 60 megabyte/sec cap. That can't be accurate I've had sustained higher than that over 2.0.

 

[alphanumeric]

Hard disk drive - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
As of 2010, a typical 7200 rpm desktop hard drive has a sustained "disk-to-buffer" data transfer rate up to 1030 Mbits/sec. A current widely used standard for the "buffer-to-computer" interface is 3.0 Gbit/s SATA, which can send about 300 megabyte/s from the buffer to the computer, and thus is still comfortably ahead of today's disk-to-buffer transfer rates.
Universal Serial Bus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The USB 2.0 specification was released in April 2000 and was standardized by the USB-IF at the end of 2001. Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Lucent Technologies (now Alcatel-Lucent), NEC and Philips jointly led the initiative to develop a higher data transfer rate, with the resulting specification achieving 480 Mbit/s, a fortyfold increase over 12 Mbit/s for the original USB 1.0.

I got it wrong, what more can I say.
I still stick to my last statement though. I personally would still buy into eSATA before USB 3.

 

[premier69]

i got som old 7200rpm drive in an old lacie usb2 external chassi and i get ALMOST 30mb/s.

 

[Maguscreed]

eSATA is better, but I've had mixed experience with it's reliability.

 

[premier69]

eSATA is better, but I've had mixed experience with it's reliability.

please explain, I am a collector and would absolutely hate to loose sveral hundreds of gigs of media stuff...

Also, how does SMART functions work with external drive? as normal?

Oh and another qustion. I have several drives and 2 of those are Seagate and Acronis disk management reports 30% SMART health status on those 2 but all others are in the green. But when testing the seagate drives using their diagnostic tools is says everything is fine... i doubt that because one of the drives seem to be having problems. Tho, my entire PC seems to suffer with I/O performance. mouse gets sluggish when transferring between drives sometimes.

 

[pparks1]

That would be roughly a 60 megabyte/sec cap. That can't be accurate I've had sustained higher than that over 2.0.

I don't think that sounds right to me. 480megabits per second is correct...so 480,000,000 / 8 = 60,000,000 bytes per second / 1024 bytes = 58,593KB/sec. I've never seen a USB 2.0 device come close to 100% full saturation, about 70% with overhead is about as good as it will get. So, 60MB/sec x .70 = 42MB/sec is as fast as USB 2.0 is really going to go.

i got som old 7200rpm drive in an old lacie usb2 external chassi and i get ALMOST 30mb/s.

That sounds a whole lot closer. I usually get 25-28MB/sec sustained transfer to my USB 2.0 devices.

 

[whs]

...

so 480,000,000 / 8 = 60,000,000 bytes

That is not quite right. Although a byte has 8 data bits, there is also a 9th checkbit. Plus there is some checkdata that can be interleaved with the records. That's why I always quote a ratio 10:1 for bits:Bytes. That is not 100% right, but close enough and easy to convert.

The last image I took to a USB3 drive (5400 RPM disk), I got about 460Mb/sec write.

 

[GeneO]

That would be roughly a 60 megabyte/sec cap. That can't be accurate I've had sustained higher than that over 2.0.

Yes it is accurate. It is 480 Mb/s, you must be mistaken. Because of protocol overheads the effective rate is more like 320 Mb/s, or 40 MBytes/s. I have never gotten sustained throughput of more than 35 MB/s. I doubt anybody else has either.

 

[pparks1]

The last image I took to a USB3 drive (5400 RPM disk), I got about 460Mb/sec write.

You got 460Mb/sec after the data was compressed and moved over to the external hard drive. Effectively, 460Mb of your system was backed up per second, but the actual throughput of the data to the device was slower. If you indeed got 460Mb/sec...you could have completed a 20GB image in just 40 seconds.

...

so 480,000,000 / 8 = 60,000,000 bytes

That is not quite right. Although a byte has 8 data bits, there is also a 9th checkbit. Plus there is some checkdata that can be interleaved with the records. That's why I always quote a ratio 10:1 for bits:Bytes. That is not 100% right, but close enough and easy to convert.

Generally speaking though, when converting data transfer rates, you use 8 bits per byte as the accepted standard. You can see this website gets the exact same results that I came up with;
http://www.sengpielaudio.com/calculator-transferrate.htm.

Either way, with 8 bits or 10x...you are roughly the same amount of data...58-62MB/sec.

 

[whs]

If you indeed got 460Mb/sec...you could have completed a 20GB image in just 40 seconds.

This you have to compute for me - but real slow please.

Here is my take:

460 Mb/sec is roughly 50MB/sec
20GB is 20,000 MB
20,000 divided by 50 is 400sec equal about 7 minutes

And that's about the time it took to take that image.

Btw: compressed or not compressed has nothing to do with it if the resulting image is 20GB - the amount of data in the partition was about 40GB.

 

[pparks1]

sorry, I thought you were talking megabytes per second, but you indeed meant megabits per second. I screwed that one up. I usually try to refer to ###Mbps when I am talking megabits and ###MB/s when I mean megabytes. Totally my bad.

 

[whs]

sorry, I thought you were talking megabytes per second, but you indeed meant megabits per second. I screwed that one up. I usually try to refer to ###Mbps when I am talking megabits and ###MB/s when I mean megabytes. Totally my bad.

Thanks, now I got my bearings back.

 

[GeneO]

There aren't that many eSATA devices around either - for as long as it has been around.
Because USB can do different kinds of devices other than SATA drives, and is backwards compatible with USB 2.0, it certainly won't be a failure, even though Intel would like it to be I think. THe fact that it can handle many different kinds of devices makes it better than eSATA for data storage.

eSATA is more suitable for system disks or SSDs where low latency is important. USB has too high a latency for these purposes.

It is just new, and slowed by Intel.