USB 3.0 Basics And Connectors
USB 3.0 sports a raw bandwidth of 5 Gb/s versus USB 2.0’s 480 Mb/s, and the beauty is that USB 3.0 will eventually entail no additional cost. For now, USB 2.0 remains the undisputed standard for thumb drives, external storage, portable drives, smart phones, digital cameras, and anything else requiring a cheap, reliable data interface. It will take a few years until USB 3.0 becomes as popular as USB 2.0, and there will be segments in which USB 3.0 isn’t necessary at all.
USB is backward compatible, meaning that a USB 3.0 device also supports USB 2.0 speeds, just like USB 2.0 supports the 12 Mb/s link speed of USB 1.1. All you need are suitable cables. The type A USB 3.0 connector is mechanically similar to the USB 3.0 plug, but it comes with additional wires for USB 3.0 link speeds. If these aren’t available on both the plug and the port, the USB link will automatically run at USB 2.0’s 480 Mb/s speed. Type B is the new Micro USB connector, which we found on all three hard drives in this review. Compared to Micro USB 2.0, the new connector offers a flatter design, which will help devices with USB 3.0 type B plugs to be thinner.
Most portable USB storage devices don’t have a power plug, but larger external drives do. This is because of the power requirements. SSDs and 2.5” hard drives can typically be powered through the USB connection, while 3.5” drives and RAID solutions require more peak power than this link can carry. This is the case for the WD MyBook 3.0 we’ll review in a moment.
Latest External Storage News
- 09/02 – Laser Heat Used to Make HDD Write Transfers Faster
- 02/02 – Seagate Quietly Intros GoFlex Thunderbolt Adapter
- 02/02 – Seagate Believes HDD Supply Disruption to Continue in 2012
- 28/01 – Cleversafe Announces 10 Exabyte Storage System Configuration
- 26/01 – Western Digital Intros My Book Thunderbolt Duo Drive
Latest External Storage reviews
- 10/11 – Round-Up: 15 microSDHC Cards, Benchmarked And Reviewed
- 25/05 – Qnap TS-559 Pro+: Familiar Network Storage With A New CPU
- 24/05 – 10 SDXC/SDHC Memory Cards, Rounded Up And Benchmarked
- 18/05 – Is Data Encryption Worth Destroying Your NAS' Performance?
- 26/04 – Nine USB 3.0 Flash Drives For Road Warriors
Be warned - I got the WD usb 3 a couple of months ago and was warned that if anything goes wrong your data is pretty much gone as the HD and housing are a bespoke design. Looking at the usb connector (also a WD only design)on the housing I felt it looked a little flimsy... guess what happened last week? When moving the HD the female USB socket connection inside the housing broke and came out when I took out the USB cable. Had to have the entire thing shipped back to WD to be repaired - they said they couldn't reattach it and that I had mishandled it. End of story lost all my data and now out of pocket for one very expensive HD :-( If you get one be very careful moving it when the cables are plugged in, its size, weight, need for separate power and flimsy connectors mean that it probably not the best 'portable' HD. Performance wise when transferring large continuous files (ISOs etc) it was bloody fast, but for folders with lots of smaller files the speed dropped dramatically as can been seen in the test results. So now looking for a replacement, will have to go back to the article to pick the best alternative.