USB 3.0's New Jacks and Sockets 390
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."
Is it burst speed? (Score:5, Interesting)
I sure hope they've addressed this issue. The OS caching helped, unless you wanted to unplug the damn thing right away - then you had to wait 5 minutes for the cache to flush out.
Will it work on Linux? (Score:5, Interesting)
Then what's the point of SATAII? (Score:5, Interesting)
its like DB9 all over again... (Score:4, Interesting)
the more things change, the more they stay the same -- now
they're back to using 9 pins to implement the spec -- other than
making the connectors physically different so people don't end up
plugging in old RS-422 cables into it -- from the number of actual
pins needed to implement a spec -- we're physically back to using
9 pins that were available in the DB9 form factor, only this connector
is considerably more difficult to manufacture.
A serious question (Score:5, Interesting)
Wasn't it vastly superior to USB? It had a higher maximum throughput that could almost be realistically achieved, delivered useful amounts of power over the bus, and allowed devices to talk to each other. The audio/video features are pretty nice as well....
Both firewire and usb were well-supported on all platforms, so *that*'s not the issue. It's also robust, to the point of being found in many modern aircraft designs and the space shuttle.
IEEE1394c is even cooler, and uses CAT5e/RJ45 for wiring, allowing for automatic negotiation between other 1394 devices, and normal ethernet devices. Max speed is 800mbps, and it very nicely bridges the gap between "traditional" peripherals, and network-attached devices.
So what happened? Did I miss something? Who killed Firewire?
And it doesn't work (Score:5, Interesting)
USB OTG is a farce.
Re:A serious question (Score:5, Interesting)
I see sata taking over for external hard drives. I converted all my firewire 800 external drives on my powermac tower to SATA 3 drives last year and gained a crapload of performance at 1/3rd the price. but every HD camcorder that is more than a toy for the masses has firewire on it and will be there forever. Even the hard drive based cameras from panasonic that cost more than most guys' houses still have firewire on them.
Problem is SATA has a failure point. I can have 20 foot firewire cables.. good luck making sata work over 3 feet.
Patents killed it (Score:3, Interesting)
Patent royalties, I believe, or at least that's the popular impression: this guy [teener.com] seems to be saying that Steve Jobs attempted to hike the royalty price and though he wasn't ultimately successful, perhaps the mere suggestion that he could was enough to sour third party implementors and move them to USB.
Like with Token Ring vs Ethernet and Objective-C vs C++, the answer seems to be that if there's a nearly-almost-good-enough open technology and a way-cool but closed/expensive technology fighting for the same market with no network effects yet in place, the open (at least in terms of free-to-implement) one wins.
(o-o-omfg ponies) EXTRA PINS??!?!? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:A serious question (Score:3, Interesting)
If you want to find out exactly how complicated the FireWire protocol is, just look in the Linux kernel. The 1394 subsystem is a huge piece of code, and it's also by far the lowest quality of all the major subsystems. Compare to the USB subsystem, which works perfectly.
Re:Yeah, it's always funny to see.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Waiting 2 minutes to unmount without any progress meter is just broken UI design.
But... (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course, the line to draw at what is 'obviously' transient may be hard, but I think 4GB and under and USB connected is a good rule of thumb today of transient sticks vs. persistantly attached usb storage. When you get into the realm of 'guessing' the intent of the user implicitly, things get hairy.
Re:(o-o-omfg ponies) EXTRA PINS??!?!? (Score:3, Interesting)
1 pin (middle) - ground (I suspect that with the higher bandwidth they're adding a signal ground separate from the already existing shared signal/power ground. this may be completely false).
2 pins (probably differential twisted pair) - "USB3_TX" - is USB3 departing from the shared-differential-bus setup?
2 pins (also probably a diff. TP) - "USB3_RX"
USB1/2 was somewhat special in contrast to Ethernet or IEEE1394 in that it used a single bus and everyone connected to it had to figure out how to share it (each device in turn takes control of the data lines when it needs to transmit). It looks like USB3 is changing this a bit (makes sense for higher bandwidth - the taking control of/releasing the data lines wasted precious data line cycles and makes the interface hardware/firmware/software do extra work). From the RX/TX markings it would seem that for two devices sharing a cable, one TP will always be driven by one device and the other by the other device. However from the little I know about the USB1/2 spec this doesn't make too much sense (currently the USB host has to poll a peripheral for it to transmit any data back the the host), so I'll be looking forward to hearing the details.
If the above guess is right then I'd expect to see a much more advanced family of USB controllers than the current (quite straight-forward) iteration. Maybe USB3 will be significantly changing the USB topology and becoming more like Firewire.. it seems somewhat logical.. who knows.
Re:Is it burst speed? (Score:4, Interesting)