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."

shades of future past

[pilgrim23]

-Little fingers inside existing fingers to work with legacy USB devices... Does anyone rememeber the EISA slot standard designed to allow inserting a ISA card?
Now all we need is a MCA driver and we are in busienss for the new world of 1992.

Other Fixes

[MBCook]

Oooh. It's faster. Wow. Didn't see that happening.

Did they fix the CPU overhead? 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? Basically, did they do anything to improve it for high-bandwidth applications (which is obviously what they're targeting) compared to FireWire?

The cable worries me some. I understand the drive for backwards compatibility, but it seems like they should make the cable more obviously different. It just looks like it will be too easy to accidentally use a USB 2 cable, not realize it, and then wonder why the device is running so slow. Just a little nub on the bottom of the connector would do it.

The point of difference busses

[l2718]

Because there's more to a bus than the bandwidth. USB has a lot of overhead (it can be branched, hook many devices etc). SATA is dedicated for controlling storage. That's why we put cameras on the USB, hard-drives on a SATA bus, the network card on the PCI bus, video card on the VESA bus ...

One suggestion

[edwardpickman]

Can they start color coding USB cable types? Some of us old timers have been around since 1.0 was popular. I've got a box full and it's always fun trying to find the 2.0 cable hiding among the 1.0 cables.I hate to toss them but I really haven't any use for 1.0 cables. I'd just love to see some kind of coding system since they all use the same connectors. At least with hard drives every time they change them we get new connectors. It may make them backwardly compatible but it does cause confusion.

Still half vertically symmetric

[Trogre]

Aargh, this connector is *still* symmetrical vertically in form factor but not electrically. Which means you'll have people fumbling behind computers/laptops turning the connectors upside-down until the cable is twisted trying to plug in their camera/mouse/hdd/coffee maker.

Either change the shape of the connector (something like RJ11 would be fine) or make the pins such that it can be inserted right-way up or upside down (figure-eight power cable connectors for example).

Re:Still half vertically symmetric

[MattHawk]

One good example is the Apple Macbook power connectors. They're palindromic, so even though they're a plain rectangle, they plug in either way (and have a power LED on both top and bottom to accommodate such). They need either that, or a nub to indicate alignment - I HATE fumbling around with USB cables to get them plugged in.

Of course, this would require abandoning backwards compatibility... but seriously, by the time that there are only USB3 ports on a device, I'm pretty sure we'll be past needing to plug 2.0 devices into it, and if we need to use an old device that badly, it would be easy enough to make them electrically compatible such that a simple dumb cable adapter can fit it. Old device standards are passed by for new ones all the time, and clinging to backwards compatibility at the costs of advancement can be a serious mistake - clinging to backwards compatibility at all costs is a significant amount of what's hampering Windows right now, for example.

Too bad

[Anonymous Coward]

God, it's still that worst of connectors, visibly symmetric but not functionally symmetric.

How friggin hard would it have been to make the connector work the same no matter which way it was plugged in? It seems to be a trivial ME problem.

The USB connector blows.

Re:A serious question

[BuishMeister]

besides firewire stack being slightly more expensive, the firewire hardware doesn't provide the power to the slave devices. So for simple things like mice / keyboards / thumb drives / card readers it is a killer. Personally, I'd take a slower speed over inconvenience of having to fumble with multiple cords, and lugging another wall cube around. USB even sprung up a whole market segment that uses the bus just for power ( lights, fans, aquariums, ash-trays, etc).

Re:A serious question

[LWATCDR]

Well part of it is Firewire isn't a replacement for USB. I haven't seen a Firewire keyboard, mouse, printer, or joystick. Yes it is mediocre all the way around but it works well for some devices that Firewire doesn't work at all for. And works well just okay for many devices that Firewire works well for. Firewire will always be an port you have to get in addition to USB. so it will alway be less popular. But I would agree with you that it isn't dead.

What about XP drivers?

[PingXao]

My gut tells me there will not be any MS-written USB 3.0 device drivers for Windows XP. Artificially making an OS "obsolete" by not providing drivers for new hardware is one way to accelerate the adoption of Vista. The code words that surround this new standard vis-a-vis Microsoft Windows reveal the inclusion of Vista-style DRM (e.g. "the HD era"). With that in mind I see MS declaring that USB 3.0 drivers for XP are technically "impossible" for reasons that will prove bogus. They may have legitimate business reasons for not providing drivers, but those won't be the reasons they trot out in public.

Re:Is it burst speed?

[letxa2000]

In case a "clueless user" yanks it "without unmounting properly?" Excuse me, but I don't think that's a matter of the user being clueless. If I have a removable drive, I don't think it's unreasonable to be able to remove it at any time--the OS should expect that. If the OS is still writing data to the drive and there's some kind of window open to that effect, then I'm stupid for disconnecting it in the middle of the process. If I "finished" copying three minutes ago, I don't think it's unreasonable for me to be able to disconnect the drive.

This is why Linux is a great OS for a server but not so hot for the desktop. Write-caching for a USB drive might make sense on a server, but not so much on the desktop.

USB's plug design is horrible

[TheBlunderbuss]

Though this comment shall be absolutely buried by now, I must voice my opinion:
I absolutely HATE the A-series (the most common) USB plug. If you are going by feel alone, you have a 50% chance of orienting the plug correctly the first time.
So frustrating. (And so is the round DIN, but that's for another time)
A good design, like D-subminiature, CAT5, and headphone jack make blind insertion easy and near-foolproof (no sex jokes please, slashdotters).
USB B-series is a lot better, but sadly isn't as ubiquitous.

Also: I'm guessing that PCI expansion cards couldn't fully utilize USB3.0?

Re:Is it burst speed?

[DaleGlass]

You can disable caching on Linux with -o sync.

However, neither that, nor what Windows does will prevent damage on a FAT32 formatted device, because the filesystem isn't made to deal with that. And even for a filesystem like ext3, reiserfs or ntfs that will not corrupt itself in this case, you'll still lose data if you yank the drive while a file is being written. Windows will warn you if you yank the drive without telling it to disconnect the drive precisely for this reason.

Really the only way of dealing with this perfectly is making the media impossible to disconnect until the filesystem is dismounted orderly. This can be done with CD and tape drives, but isn't going to work with anything connected to an USB port.

Re:Is it burst speed?

[Fred Ferrigno]

You can disable caching on Linux with -o sync.

There ought to be a safe middle ground between no cache at all and a cache that expects the drive will always be there. Something that keeps IO from blocking, but doesn't spread out writes so far that the user has a chance to conclude the drive is idle and safe to pull.

Re:Is it burst speed?

[dabraun]

Windows will warn you if you yank the drive without telling it to disconnect the drive precisely for this reason.

I've used USB drives on Windows for years and I've never seen such a warning. It might warn you if you pulled it during a file copy (I've never done that, obviously it sounds like a bad idea) but certainly not if you wait for the copy to complete.

In fact, it would be really cool if it popped up an alert if you pulled the drive while it was still writing to the effect of "oh no! plug it back in and I'll finish the operation so you'll have a coherent filesystem" (hopefully something worded more professional and less techy)

Re:Is it burst speed?

[ravenlock]

So you have a couple of milliseconds to stop the yanking motion and stick it back? I'm sure that's going to help a lot of people. :P

Re:Still using rectangular connectors, I see.

[Loibisch]

This should have been modded insightful, not funny...because there's nothing less funny than to connect an USB cable when you can just barely reach (but not see) the connectors. You never know if you just didn't hit the USB-port straight or if you're trying it 180 degrees reversed and have no chance whatsoever.

It's a tragedy, really...