USB 3.0's New Jacks and Sockets

The Register has a brief look posted (with photos and diagrams) of "USB 3.0, the upcoming version of the universal add-on standard re-engineered for the HD era, made a small appearance at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES)." The posting explains that USB 3.0 "wasn't demonstrated in operation, but we did get to see what the new connectors look like." How does it handle backward compatibility? The extra pins needed for USB 3.0 "are placed behind the USB 1.1/2.0 ones. USB 3.0 connectors and receptacles will be deeper than the current ones."

Re:Other Fixes

[Svet-Am]

Did they make a P2P version so that I don't need a computer to connect a camera to a hard drive and have it work?

Yes, they did. Several years ago, in fact. It's called USB On the Go [usb.org]

Re:Then what's the point of SATAII?

[Midnight Thunder]

Funny how I just upgraded to a new computer that uses SATA 3.0Gb/s. If USB3 is faster than SATAII, then why not just use that for drives? Not that anyone ever really maxes out SATAII to begin with. So it's all kind of useless in the end.

The problem with SATA, IMHO, is that makes a shoddy external connector. There is no notion of hubs or even daisy-chaining. USB and Firewire both support hubs, whereas Firewire supports daisy-chaining. With SATA you need as many external SATA sockets on your computer as you have external SATA drives. If your main computer is a portable, then this is a poor solution.

Probably not

[XanC]

They'll come up with that later. USB 1 had two data rates: "low speed", 1.5Mbits/s, and "full speed", 12Mbits/s. USB 2.0 added "high speed" at 480Mbits/s. No idea what superlative they'll reach for this time.

Re:Then what's the point of SATAII?

[RobFlynn]

I've seen SATAII hubs before.

Here's one that I found with a couple seconds of googling: http://www.cooldrives.com/sahub5muussi.html [cooldrives.com]

Re:Is it burst speed?

[gillbates]

Yes, and no.

You see, 480 Mbs is the electrical interface speed. As in, 480 Million bits go across the wire every second. Not all of those bits are used for traffic.

However, some of those bits are used by the overhead of the transfer protocol. You've got USB packets in the stream which do nothing but reserve space for some psuedo-realtime device which might be connected to the bus at any second. Whether or not the OS/USB Controller allocates these blank packets even in cases where they aren't needed is a matter of programming.

As an aside, I've noticed that on the same computer, with the same flash drive, Linux does a much faster job with file transfers than Windows. I suspect Windows is just under-utilizing the bus, to make it easier for their engineers. But I could be wrong, as I haven't looked into it in detail.

Re:Naming

[Brobock]

So they're going with a 3.0 instead of some crazy More Full Speed (TM) name this time?

FTA:
Dubbed SuperSpeed USB, the third major incarnation of the serial bus standard is set to deliver data transfer speeds of around 4.7Gb/s - ten times today's 480Mb/s limit.

They haven't TM'd it yet though.

But...

[hackerjoe]

Jacks are sockets. It's always been a great mystery of tech jargon to me that female connectors are referred to as jacks.

Re:A serious question

[appleguru]

Nobody... The problem with firewire is its cost-- USB is, on the device side, dirt cheap to implement. This comes at the cost of needing a host controller (your computer) to do anything and that comes with CPU use overhead. Firewire requires these 'controllers' in every device, making it far more useful (allowing things such as communication without a computer!), robust, and fast without the overhead. But it costs more! And, as we know, price is what drives the marketplace. As a 'normal' uniformed consumer, would you buy a firewire 400 widget for $100 if the usb version cost $50 and both "did the same thing" and ran at a theoretical "480 mbps" (And we all (by all, I mean us on slashdot) know how well usb2 does that...). As a 'normal' consumer, of course not!

Firewire is far from dead, however... Nearly all consumer/prosumer mini dv cameras use it (including hdv cameras), many set top boxes and HDTVs have 1394 links on them for connecting devices (DVHS decks, HDTVs, and cable boxes... this transport MPEG-2 transport streams), and every mac since the iMac debuted has shipped with firewire ports on it (Many, many external hard drives have firewire ports on them.. the good ones anyways ;))... Sony has been shipping 1394 on its vaio computers for ages (in the form of i.link), and all modern computer manufactures have followed suit.

So, to answer your question, consumers "killed" firewire by being... well... price conscious consumers. But in reality it's not going anywhere, and with any luck and all the cool networking capabilities the firewire spec has these days it will eventually catch on with the majority of consumers as a convenient way to interconnect devices and stick around for good.

Re:One suggestion

[Teilo]

Umm, you do realize that USB 1.0 and 2.0 use the exact same cables and connectors [usb.org], don't you?

Just asking, because you sound too serious to be joking.

Re:And it doesn't work

[Xamindar]

Did you remember to use the proper cable to switch it to host? Might want to look into that. USB on the go works great on my Sharp Zaurus 3100. I can plug it into a computer with the regular cable and it becomes an external hard drive. Or I can use the host cable (in the same port) and turn it into the host and connect any usb device I can find a driver for to it (flash drives, mice, keyboard, bluetooth). It is very usefull.

Re:Other Fixes

[tlhIngan]

Did they make a P2P version so that I don't need a computer to connect a camera to a hard drive and have it work?

Yes, they did. Several years ago, in fact. It's called USB On the Go

Actually, it's not strictly P2P using USB OTG. One device is still the host, the other the client. It's just there's a complex protocol they can go through (Host Negotiation Protocol) to switch roles if necessary. Of course, both sides have to support OTG.

Also, there aren't many devices out there that are actually OTG complaint. Most just have an USB host port. Or an illegal USB Mini-AB connector (reserved for OTG-logo'd devices), but they don't support OTG.

Re:A serious question

[bgeerdes]

every mac since the iMac debuted has shipped with firewire ports on it

Wrong. The original iMacs just had 2 USB ports. Firewire didn't appear until the iMac DV/SE.

Re:Is it burst speed?

[jubei]

Your windows file copy slowness could be because Windows does not use write caching for removable drives. This allows clueless users to just yank out the disk without unmounting properly. If you are getting slow reads, that is a different story.

Re:A serious question

[DECS]

Microsoft actually supported Firewire before getting USB complete, particularly USB 2.0, where the two standards overlap in certain areas. While Firewire was invented by Apple, Microsoft also actually delivered support for IP over Firewire first (several years first), although I doubt many people used it on Windows because most PCs that have Firewire only have the 4-pin, non-powered version like Sony's iLink. Mini-to-mini Firewire cables are not too common.

Apple didn't support IP over Firewire networking until around 10.3.5 IIRC. Now that it's there, it is actually quite useful on Macs as a secondary network interface, since all modern Macs have FW400 and many now have FW800 too. Macs also have smart enough firmware to use Firewire in Target Mode, which is a significant feature other PCs won't match anytime soon.

The new FW3200 uses the same connector as FW800, an advantage over the different and more complex USB 3.0 connector.

Another advantage of Firewire is that it provides higher voltage for charging, so it can power more significant devices and can recharge devices faster. It's noticiably faster to charge iPods/iPhone over Firewire. The 30-pin Dock Connector has Firewire compatible pins for charging, even though modern iPods don't support Firewire for data exchange.

There's really no reason for Apple to drop Firewire, and it will be difficult for PC makers to match the features of Macs even when including Firewire ports on their PCs. Not only do BIOS PCs lack any firmware support for target mode use, but Microsoft dropped IP over Firewire in Vista (!). USB 3.0 might bump the speed for new devices, but it doesn't match the Firewire-related features that exist now, and doesn't match the throughput of FW3200, which is also in the pipeline.

Ten Big Predictions for Apple in 2008 [roughlydrafted.com]
What's Apple going to be up to in 2008? The previous article looked at clues from the Newton MessagePad to the iPhone. Here's a look at the potential future of the rest of Apple's businesses, from hardware to software to services.

Re:Other Fixes

[dfn_deux]

Nothing complicated about it, ground out one of the wires and the port acts as host, let it float and it acts as a device. Only limitation it has that doesn't exist as part of the regular USB standard is the available current is only half (IIRC) of the regular usb standard. Some usb chipsets allow the switching to be down with software instead of using special cables even, something like 'echo "host" >/proc/usb/0' or somesuch, check the internet tablet forums to see how the Nokia IT users are already making good use of both methods.

Re:Will it work on Linux?

[ClamIAm]

Where do I get the spec for USB, EHCI or a device class? [usb.org]

P.S. These things aren't that hard to find for yourself. You can almost always use Google and/or Wikipedia to find the Web site of the company or consortium that defines a specification, or a page that explains the licensing.

Re:shades of future past

[Agripa]

The EISA connector is the same length as the 16 bit ISA connector and has an extra row of pins on each side at a different height. The same double pin height design was used for the AGP connector.

Re:Is it burst speed?

[jimdread]

Yep, I haven't used Windows at home since 2003 (ish?). Linux definitely does use the device better, but the umount command can stall for up to 5 minutes while it writes out the cache.

You can use the "sync" command to flush the file system buffers, instead of waiting for umount to do it for you. It's going to take some amount of time to write large files, the real issue is when that writing occurs. So instead of doing "cp file /usb" and then later unmounting the usb and having to wait, you can "cp file /usb; sync" and the writing will be done immediately. When you later decide to unmount the usb stick, it should happen immediately.

Re:What PC USB need

[Hal_Porter]

Seems like PC USB are processor intensive - it use up an interrupt and fill a small buffer.

Actually USB is quite system friendly. The CPU maintains a complicated tree structures of descriptors memory and then the host adapter parses it via bus master DMA and generates the appropriate bust transactions.

The CPU can request an interrupt when a transfer is complete or at the end of a frame to add new descriptors and remove ones that have completed. It's all pretty elegant really. Essentially when you want to send something you add a descriptor and then later you get an interrupt when the transfer is done, even if it took a few retries. It has to be like this, since Windows 95 had terrible worst case interrupt latency and that was where USB started off.

Re:And it doesn't work

[petermgreen]

No it is not like a null modem cable. Afaict USB is always wired D+ to D+ and D- to D-.

There are two types of full size USB plugs, A and B. A always goes at the host end B always goes at the perhipheral end.

There are also two types of mini plugs mini A and mini B. But unlike with the full size connectors there is also a socket called mini AB that takes both. The same applies to the micro connectors.

Mini plugs have five pins. The extra pin is used to indicate to a device with a mini AB socket whether it should be acting as a host or as a perhiperal. (I think in a mini B plug it is open circuit in a mini A plug it is connected to ground but i'm not positive and the information seems to have dissapeared from wikipedia).

If everyone followed the rules it would be easy as you would not be able to create an out of whack network. Sadly a wide variety of noncompliant cables and adaptors are commonly availible, the difference between mini-A and mini-B is not that obvious to the untrained eye and many people are unaware that mini-A even exists.