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USB 3.0 Preview

USB 3.0 is now arriving on motherboards from the likes of GIGABYTE and ASUS. What should we expect from SuperSpeed USB 3.0? It looks like it will actually live up to its nickname!

What is USB 3.0?

I think most of us are familiar with USB and USB 2.0 connected devices. The next advancement in Universal Serial Bus technology we are now seeing come to market is the USB 3.0 specification being billed as "SuperSpeed USB." USB 3.0 connections have twice as many wires as a USB 2.0 connection, but the plug into your motherboard or USB 3.0 card will be backwards compatible with USB 2.0. You CAN plug a USB 2.0 device into a USB 3.0 port and have it work. You can also plug a USB 3.0 device into a USB 2.0 connection as well. Below is a screen shot of Windows 7 letting you know that you are not going as fast as you could!

So we will see new USB 3.0 cables that look the same on the connection end, but a tad bit different on the device end as shown below. This will keep folks from trying to use USB 2.0 cables and plugging them into USB 3.0 devices.

How Fast is USB 3.0?

First and foremost, we are not even able to show you here today how fast USB 3.0 can be with a real-world device. The fact of the matter is that USB 3.0 devices are very new and very much in a maturing process. We don’t have any devices that can even come to fully leveraging USB 3.0’s possible bandwidth. What we can show you is that USB 3.0 blows USB 2.0 out of the water and is still devilishly fast even with today’s devices.

Keep in mind these are all "raw" bandwidth numbers. USB 3.0 specification states that it can transfer up to "4.8Gbps." That is 4.8 Gigabits per second, not Gigabytes per second; just to be sure we are talking about the same thing. (Here is a bit calculator tool that will come in handy for you as well.) If we are talking about Megabytes per second, USB 3.0 comes in at 614.4MBps. For us old timers, that is roughly 418 3.5 inch floppy disks per second. We find the old USB 2.0 specification coming in at an official 480Mbps (megabits, not megabytes). To compare again with the old floppy disk, at its peak, USB 2.0 could transfer approximately 40 3.5 inch floppy disks per second. As you see, USB 3.0 is 10X faster than USB 2.0…or rather the USB 3.0 bus is capable of it if you have a device capable of pushing it.

To further put it into perspective, USB 3.0 is even faster than eSATA at 300MBps! USB 3.0 transfer speeds and SATA III transfer speeds both weigh in at about 600MBps. This should allow us to very much leverage new SATA III hard drives and RAID configurations externally.

USB 3.0 Motherboards

Currently we have three USB 3.0 equipped motherboards in our possession. The Gigabyte X58A-UD7 that we showed you here earlier this week. We have also taken delivery on a Gigabyte P55A-UD6 motherboard that has USB 3.0. Both of these motherboards are part of Gigabyte’s new "333 Onboard Acceleration" series. As well as having USB 3.0 on board, these two boards also carry the new SATA 3.0 controllers as well. Gigabyte also promotes "3x USB Power Boost" to round out the 333 series, but to be perfectly honest I am unsure as how to test this claim.

ASUS has also supplied us a motherboard and USB 3.0 device that we are not using here today, but will be covering in our review soon. The ASUS P5P55D-E Premium "Xtreme Design" motherboard. It has onboard SATA 3.0 as well.

USB 3.0 on Our Desktop

Using our Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD7 motherboard we did some very simple testing, since we only have one device. We looked at several different ways to measure the performance of our USB 3.0 device that Gigabyte supplied us; the Buffalo external drive pictured below. Ours looks to have been purchased in Japan, and Gigabyte did request us to send it back. Now I did make a go at tearing it apart in order to install an Intel SSD, but I found no easy way to get the enclosure opened and I was afraid of tearing up the drive and did not want to send it back to Gigabyte in pieces. So we are making a go of that with another device that ASUS has supplied us, so keep your eyes open for that.

I settled on HD Tach for our tool for this article as it gives some very simple looks that draw a good picture as to what to currently expect from USB 3.0 hard drive devices.

USB 2.0 vs. USB 3.0

The graph you see above is using the Buffalo 1TB external hard drive for both our USB 3.0 and 2.0 connections. All we have done is take the device and switched it between USB 3.0 and 2.0 ports on our motherboard. So this should represent a very good "apples to apples" comparison. Actually it was the only one we could provide given us not being able to easily take the Buffalo drive apart.

Certainly you can see where the USB 2.0 connected hard drive is limited by its USB 2.0 connection. Plugging the exact same drive in out USB 3.0 connection we see very much faster reads being done on the exact same drive. But we told you above that it was 10X faster and this surely is not 10X. You would be correct. As we mentioned above, the hard drive we have is not capable of pushing our USB 3.0 bandwidth to its limit.

So USB 3.0 allowed us to achieve a sequential read speed about 80MBps faster than 2.0. USB 3.0 also allowed us to achieve burst speeds readings of about 150MBps faster than 2.0. Random access times are the same as this is fully dependent on the drive itself in our situation, and CPU utilization was the same as well given the margin of error.

While this not apples to apples below, I plugged in an older 500GB external Seagate that has both USB 2.0 and FireWire connections to give you a better reference about the USB 3.0 drive speeds above.

The Bottom Line

USB 3.0 is blindingly fast compared to our "old" USB 2.0 connections. Obviously external storage is where we will see the biggest impact immediately. We can’t wait to see what we can get with SATA III / USB 3.0 attached solid state drive RAIDs! But even if you are not looking for all out overkill, USB 3.0 can surely give you some real world advantages if you like your data outside of your chassis. Hopefully we will see flash memory speeds gets faster so our little USB "thumb" drives are not so cumbersomely slow.

Beyond storage there are a whole host of usages for USB 3.0 in terms of video and the like. High resolution cameras and plug in Blu-ray devices as well.

Hopefully we have given you a peek as to what is to come with USB 3.0. We expect it to be a staple on all enthusiast motherboards very soon. And of course add-in cards will be available as well.

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