USB 3

Pete Gl

Pete Gl

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I keep reading things about USB3, and have seen adverts for USB3 compatible devices, for example, external hard disk drives. But I have yet to see an advertisement for a laptop with USB3 sockets.

Anybody know anything?

Pete
 
dell precision range do, theyre not cheap though. likewise the HP Envy.

i imagine its due to higher spec chipsets being required raising costs etc so only on higher grade machines.
 
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Probably cheaper to get a PC Express card although you might not get the full speed benefit it will be faster than USB2. You need to check if your laptop has the Express Card slot, older laptops had PCMCIA slots. Link
 
Im running my backups on USB3, ive also set up some laptops with it using the pc express cards.

Its wicked fast and really very nice, check out the seagate go-flex stuff
 
Thanks for replying guys, amjad, that looks like an interesting interim way, thanks.

Pete
 
My Samsung RF510 laptop has 2 USB3 ports - combined with a USB3 MyBook it's nippy doing backups
 
amjad175 said:
Probably cheaper to get a PC Express card although you might not get the full speed benefit it will be faster than USB2. You need to check if your laptop has the Express Card slot, older laptops had PCMCIA slots. Link
Click to expand...

How do I know if I have Express Card slot or PCMCIA? My laptop manual says "The PC Card slot can accomodate one Type II PC Card. You can install any industry standard PC Card such as a SCSI adapter, Ethernet adapter or flash memory card"

Thanks

Pete
 
PCI Express slots are narrower at 3cms. PCMCIA are wider at 5.5cms.
 
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From the wording I suspect you have an older PCMCIA slot as these were refereed to as PC slots. However if your laptop is fairly new it's probably got an Express card slot. Express card's come in 2 flavours Express 34 and Express 54 My old Compaq which is 4 years old has an Express 34 slot

Might be worth checking the original spec though.
 
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As above, unfortunately looks like you have the older PC Card (PCMCIA) laptop. Had a quick search but didn't find any PC Card to USB 3 adapters.
 
OK guys, thanks very much for the info.

Pete
 
Ive got a fairly recent Acer 5750 which had a USB 3.0 socket, its a budget laptop but has the second generation i3 processor so could be the new chipsets including them right across the range.
 
Julie has just been upgraded to the i7 950 and has 2x USB 3 sockets, it rocks, lightning fast backups

:)
 
My Medion laptop came with a USB 3 socket. Haven't got any devices for it like, but I think they are definitely becoming more of a commodity item.
 
At the moment it's just a gimic. Seeing as USB has more competition against other buses now they are being forced to adapt to catch up with the times. At some point it will become standard and your start seeing devices that can use the bandwidth but at the moment I wouldn't bother with it unless you have a device and PC capable of using the extra bandwidth.

Most of it is just FUD like SATA. Sata 1 was 1.5GB/s, Sata 2 was 3GB/s and now theirs Sata 3 at 6GB/s

This gives us 150MB/s, 300MB/s and 600MB/s after overheads and taking into bits to bytes etc.

Not to shabby but when you consider that most drives ( conventional ATA ) max out at around ~60-140 MB/s hardly seems worth it. If you rag your skoda down an empty 3 lane motorway at 90MPH and then the motorway suddenly increases to 6 or 9 lanes it's not going to make a blind bit of difference to your top speed ;)

The only difference in a lot of cases between a SATA1 and SATA2 harddrive is the controller and the £££ and it will be largely the same with USB2 vs USB3 Hard Drives
 
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