SuperSpeed USB 10Gbps Specification Set and Ready for Development

[superboyac]

http://hothardware.com/News/SuperSpeed-USB-10Gbps-Specification-Set-and-Ready-for-Development/

Things are about to get faster. The USB Promoter Group announced that it has completed the USB 3.1 specification, which will enable SuperSpeed USB performance of 10Gbps. This, of course, rivals Intel and Apple’s blazing fast 10Gbps Thunderbolt interface, and the new USB connection will make use of more efficient data encoding, and it will be compatible with earlier USB specifications (USB 3.0 and 2.0).

OK, I'm annoyed yet again.  I'm always on top of all these fast transfer speed technology.  Do you know how hard of a time I have had in the past decade finding ANY devices that even make use of these technologies?  USB 3.0?  hardly anything.  esata?  barely took off.  thunderbolt/light peak?  nothing.  And now there's USB 3.1?  We don't even have anything with USB 3.0 yet, and it's been a while!  I don't understand any of this.

Just last month, I probably spent hours trying to figure out what pci addon card i need to get to make use of the usb 3.0 ports on my tower and also add some spare ports for an external drive or hub.  The only ones available are the largely unreliable ones made in china.  And they have issues, I don't use any of my large 3.5" drives externally on them because they experience corruption issues because of the driver or something.  I only use the SSD external drive with it for transfers i don't really care that much about.

I even bought a couple of thumbdrives with usb 3.0 just to test them out (they all suck except for the big fatty fat ones).  But most of the manufacturers are still selling USB 2.0 stuff, like a 90-10% ratio.  And I heard (perhaps here?) that the reason is because they are just trying to get rid of their old stock.  It's all very annoying.  First thing that needs to happen is can some companies (american or another reliable sort) make a f*&^ing  PCI card that can add 4+ ports of anything fast?  Where is thunderbolt?  All that talk and two years later there is nothing!  two years!

[x16wda]

USB 3.0?  hardly anything.  esata?  barely took off.  thunderbolt/light peak?  nothing.

Really? My laptop and desktop boxes (both 1-2 years old) have USB3 ports so I picked up a couple USB external drives. Impressive speed boost for backups especially. The two USB3 thumb drives I have (one of which has a hardware write switch) are noticeably faster than their USB2 brethren. And in fact we popped a USB3 PCI card in an old server (a Dell 2500) at one of our plants to add some quick capacity and it has been working great. (Seems peppier than USB 1.1!  ) At home I also have three USB3 SATA enclosures from Bergtek that are awesome. And in none of these cases did we need to hunt around for the pieces parts.

(Although, to be honest, when I was given a laptop with an eSata port at work, I had to hunt a little to find an enclosure so I could back it up at a reasonable speed... for which I was grateful a week later after I overwrote the drive with a thin client we were looking at...)

No, what ticks me off is that they wait until I go ahead and buy a fair number of these things, THEN they give it the big speed boost...

[4wd]

Just last month, I probably spent hours trying to figure out what pci addon card i need to get to make use of the usb 3.0 ports on my tower and also add some spare ports for an external drive or hub.  The only ones available are the largely unreliable ones made in china.  And they have issues, I don't use any of my large 3.5" drives externally on them because they experience corruption issues because of the driver or something.

Reading that I can't decide whether you want a PCIe card to add more USB3 ports or a PCI bracket to connect to ports headers already available on the motherboard.

FWIW, I've had an ASUS U3S6 PCIe card in my computer for the last two years running without a problem, cost AU$20.

Edit: Ah, do you want a PCIe card with internal headers to connect to ports on the case?

[Tinman57]

  It's all just to get you to spend more money on "upgrades".  They do it with every piece of hardware on the market.  They'll sell you a piece of hardware that they claim is the fastest, and then 8 months later will come out with something that's 10 times faster that they've had in the making even while selling the older hardware.  Rinse, repeat = more money.
  I'm one of those folks that won't upgrade as soon as something comes to market.  I'll patiently wait a while for either the price to come down to a reasonable amount, fixes to the hardware/drivers or the "New" upgrade hits the market.  Saved a butt-load of money that way.....

[superboyac]

Maybe I'm overreacting again.  My desktop motherboard is perhaps a year older than when USB 3.0 was rolled out.  And maybe I just had bad luck with the PCIe card I got.

I do have a nice laptop with a raided SSD dual drive inside, and when i tested it through the usb 3.0 connection, it was crazy...like 180 MB/s.  But I always like modular options for desktops like addon card or hubs etc.  But I keep forgetting that the desktop market is dying.

[ewemoa]

Have had rotten luck booting from USB 3 ports -- often doesn't work, when it does speed seems slow, etc.

I'd be much happier if the booting part would get fixed

[Renegade]

Windows is nasty with USB. There are bugs where speeds crawl and the only way to fix it is to sacrifice several endangered chickens while chanting black magic in ancient Egyptian as you... etc. etc.

Try deleting the device in the device manager then rebooting. Idiotic? Yes. Does it work? Kind of. But you can try the chicken thing too. It probably works better.

[Shades]

@ewemoa:
I have bought some new motherboards lately and I saw in the UEFI/BIOS part new options with regards to booting from USB. There were 3 options: disable / enable/ partially enable

I understand these options were build-in to make your computer boot faster. Apparently it takes too much time to check if devices are connected to USB ports...

Maybe it would be a good to take a look your UEFI/BIOS settings to see if you can improve USB handling during system startup.

[ewemoa]

@Shades:

Thanks for the advice.  I will take another look at the UEFI/BIOS settings on a couple of the newer machines -- I didn't see anything the last few times I checked, but perhaps I'll be luckier this time around

[Vurbal]

Windows is nasty with USB. There are bugs where speeds crawl and the only way to fix it is to sacrifice several endangered chickens while chanting black magic in ancient Egyptian as you... etc. etc.

Try deleting the device in the device manager then rebooting. Idiotic? Yes. Does it work? Kind of. But you can try the chicken thing too. It probably works better.

And sometimes a port will simply stop working entirely until you reinstall Windows no matter what you do. But if you sacrifice the chickens first you'll have something to eat while you wait.

[superboyac]

Windows is nasty with USB. There are bugs where speeds crawl and the only way to fix it is to sacrifice several endangered chickens while chanting black magic in ancient Egyptian as you... etc. etc.

Try deleting the device in the device manager then rebooting. Idiotic? Yes. Does it work? Kind of. But you can try the chicken thing too. It probably works better.

That's kinda how I feel also.  That's why I never really liked USB, fromt he beginning days, for anything really serious.  yeah, I love it for peripherals, thumbdrives...but for any serious work like backing up, syncing reliably, migrating drives, etc. I always try to stay away from it.  When esata came out, i really wanted it to replace usb for everything, like make it extinct.  I love esata.  now we have thunderbolt, but nothing is really taking advantage of it.  Like, i want thunderbolt enclosures, thunderbolt thumbdrives, etc. And I don't know what all the specific issues are, so that's all I can say , is what i want.
so whatever.  I want things like a thunderbolt external plug on a tower, where I plug in a thunderbolt hub, connect like 5 external drives to it, and move files around to each of them with >100 MB/s speeds.  things like that.  That would be progress that i'd consider to be very exciting.

[Vurbal]

Windows is nasty with USB. There are bugs where speeds crawl and the only way to fix it is to sacrifice several endangered chickens while chanting black magic in ancient Egyptian as you... etc. etc.

Try deleting the device in the device manager then rebooting. Idiotic? Yes. Does it work? Kind of. But you can try the chicken thing too. It probably works better.

That's kinda how I feel also.  That's why I never really liked USB, fromt he beginning days, for anything really serious.  yeah, I love it for peripherals, thumbdrives...but for any serious work like backing up, syncing reliably, migrating drives, etc. I always try to stay away from it.  When esata came out, i really wanted it to replace usb for everything, like make it extinct.  I love esata.  now we have thunderbolt, but nothing is really taking advantage of it.  Like, i want thunderbolt enclosures, thunderbolt thumbdrives, etc. And I don't know what all the specific issues are, so that's all I can say , is what i want.
so whatever.  I want things like a thunderbolt external plug on a tower, where I plug in a thunderbolt hub, connect like 5 external drives to it, and move files around to each of them with >100 MB/s speeds.  things like that.  That would be progress that i'd consider to be very exciting.

The more I think about it, the more likely it seems we'll eventually end up with something ethernet based. It more or less has all the benefits firewire did (man I miss my firewire) but it's application, platform, and media agnostic. The only thing it's missing is a better connector or maybe even a whole new media and it could hit the ground running.