It will be Nikon Sony and Canon who set the fate of USB3 vs TB on Apple products
Does anyone seriously think they will go with TB?
Does anyone seriously think they will go with TB?
My 5400RPM 2TB WDC Elements hard drive tops out at 26MB/s, according to the Activity Monitor.USB 3.0 should be faster than a *single* spinning hard drive, but it can be a bottleneck if you have many devices or if some of them are RAID-0 or SSD.
You also have an issue of increased latency with cache reads - with single drives showing up with 64 MiB caches, reads that hit in the cache will be slowed by USB 3.0, even with a single drive.
TBolt should be fast enough for single drive cache reads, but if you have a number of drives it could become noticeable. People who say that "you need an SSD to really use TBolt" aren't thinking about running multiple drives at once.
So, what's to say about USB3 goes more or less for FW3200 as well (as FW is more efficient than USB3), may it or may it not been superseeded by Thunderbolt.Universal Serial Bus 3.0 Specification said:A new feature is the "SuperSpeed" bus, which provides a fourth transfer mode at 5.0 Gbit/s. The raw throughput is 4 Gbit/s, and the specification considers it reasonable to achieve 3.2 Gbit/s (0.4 GB/s or 400 MB/s), or more, after protocol overhead.
I wouldn't mind a $100 premium on a nice 3.5" dual bay thunderbolt enclosure.
A $100 premium on a $50 product sounds great where do I get in line?
My 5400RPM 2TB WDC Elements hard drive tops out at 26MB/s, according to the Activity Monitor.
Image
Cache
Disk ### Status Size Type Maker RPM MiB Rd MB/sec
-------- ------ ------- ------------ ------- ---- ----- -----------
Disk 0 Online 120 GB Vertex 2 OCZ SSD 230
Disk 1 Online 750 GB ST3750630AS Seagate 7200 16 101
Disk 2 Online 750 GB ST3750640AS Seagate 7200 16 80 (older)
Disk 3 Online 2000 GB ST32000542AS Seagate 5900 32 120
Disk 4 Online 1500 GB ST31500541AS Seagate 5900 32 92
Disk 5 Online 1500 GB ST31500541AS Seagate 5900 32 91
Disk 6 Online 2000 GB ST32000542AS Seagate 5900 32 110
Disk 7 Online 2000 GB ST32000542AS Seagate 5900 32 115
Disk 8 Online 2000 GB ST32000542AS Seagate 5900 32 121
Disk 9 Online 1500 GB ST31500541AS Seagate 5900 32 110
Disk 10 Online 1500 GB ST31500541AS Seagate 5900 32 106
Disk 11 Online 2000 GB ST32000542AS Seagate 5900 32 110
Disk 12 Online 2000 GB ST32000542AS Seagate 5900 32 110
From that point of view, I conclude this:
USB2: 5400RPM hard drives and USB sticks.
USB3: 7200RPM hard drives and 2 drive RAIDs like the MyBook II Studio, as well as SandForce-1 SSDs.
TBolt: SandForce-2 SSDs and RAIDs > 2 drives.
You are wrong. Apple is guidde solely by profits. Since USB 3.0 support is not included in current Intel chip sets Apple is bulking at paying $3 extra for additional controller chip to add it to Mac computers.
And hurting their own reputation. This new 16-core Mac Pro is going to look pretty stupid without USB3. Spend $6000+ on a new computer and no USB3 for a lack of a $3 part in bulk? WTF....![]()
Yeah, you comparing "Read speed for spiral outer track raw I/O, 512 KiB buffers, two threads (double-buffered)." to my real world data here. As it's the only drive connected to USB, I don't see any bottlenecking in the 37MB/s area.Seriously flawed test - the disk is bottlenecked by USB, so you conclude USB is good enough?
On my Dell Studio XPS mini-tower system (24 GiB, Core i7 940, x58), I haveCode:Cache Disk ### Status Size Type Maker RPM MiB Rd MB/sec -------- ------ ------- ------------ ------- ---- ----- ----------- Disk 0 Online 120 GB Vertex 2 OCZ SSD 230 Disk 1 Online 750 GB ST3750630AS Seagate 7200 16 101 Disk 2 Online 750 GB ST3750640AS Seagate 7200 16 80 (older) Disk 3 Online 2000 GB ST32000542AS Seagate 5900 32 120 Disk 4 Online 1500 GB ST31500541AS Seagate 5900 32 92 Disk 5 Online 1500 GB ST31500541AS Seagate 5900 32 91 Disk 6 Online 2000 GB ST32000542AS Seagate 5900 32 110 Disk 7 Online 2000 GB ST32000542AS Seagate 5900 32 115 Disk 8 Online 2000 GB ST32000542AS Seagate 5900 32 121 Disk 9 Online 1500 GB ST31500541AS Seagate 5900 32 110 Disk 10 Online 1500 GB ST31500541AS Seagate 5900 32 106 Disk 11 Online 2000 GB ST32000542AS Seagate 5900 32 110 Disk 12 Online 2000 GB ST32000542AS Seagate 5900 32 110
Read speed for spiral outer track raw I/O, 512 KiB buffers, two threads (double-buffered). The 5900 RPM disks are Seagate "Green LP" drives.
Perhaps you should rethink this. Virtually any current 2.5" or 3.5" spinning hard drive will overwhelm USB 2.0.
Anyone using more than one drive at once would want even higher bandwidth. The real advantage of TBolt isn't that it can drive RAID-0 SSD arrays, but that you can have several external hard drives and run a number of them at full speed without slowing down.
And hurting their own reputation. This new 16-core Mac Pro is going to look pretty stupid without USB3. Spend $6000+ on a new computer and no USB3 for a lack of a $3 part in bulk? WTF....![]()
So if you care, go buy a PCIx USB 3.0 card for $30?
Yeah, you comparing "Read speed for spiral outer track raw I/O, 512 KiB buffers, two threads (double-buffered)." to my real world data here. As it's the only drive connected to USB, I don't see any bottlenecking in the 37MB/s area.
My WD Green 500 GB runs 60-100 MB/s.Do you seriously believe that current SATA drives tip out at under 40 MByte/sec?
My WD Green 500 GB runs 60-100 MB/s.
The peak speed requires a lot of conditions to meet but it is faster than 40 MB/s,
No, I bought it 3 years ago on a Frys gift card. I still have about 100 GB left on it. It is perfectly fine for storage but I would not use it as a boot drive. (Personal experience.)And the "green" one, while "server grade" (sorry could not pass on this one) obviously is not a very fast drive.
So if you care, go buy a PCIx USB 3.0 card for $30?
Latency is higher and you have to waste a slot. And for $6000, IMO it definitely should be on the motherboard in 2011 (USB3 has been out for some time now).
That depends on the board and PCH used. I have seen boards with PCIe x1 slots directly to the processor or IOH. Otherwise they are off of the PCH/FCH/SB.Unless I'm missing something my understanding is even USB 3.0 would interface to the south bridge, whereas PCIx is on the north bridge. I would think a pcix usb 3.0 card would run pretty much as fast as a southbridge-connected usb 3.0 chip.
That depends on the board and PCH used. I have seen boards with PCIe x1 slots directly to the processor or IOH. Otherwise they are off of the PCH/FCH/SB.
So many sockets. So many acronyms. At I managed to confirm that X79 is a PCH. Sheesh!
Supposedly the current LGA 1155 based Sandy Bridge processors have PCIe 3.0 support. Intel just decided not to enable it. (There was even a Z68 board with PCIe 3.0 at Computex. Do not ask me how that works.)Is X79 finally PCIe 3.0 or 2.0? Intel has finally driven me to confusion.
LightPeak is still going to require an additional controller.
I see a lot of kvetching about the lack of USB3 on the Mac side and the main reason we don't see it is that Intel hasn't really released their own chipset yet - the present USB3 chipsets are non Intel and since Intel are the ones dragging their feet producing a chipset (won't be out until next year) that's why you aren't seeing it. Macs use Intel motherboards so put two and two together.
Maybe there will be a Thunderbolt to USB dongle adapter someday.
And for me Thunderbolt would be important. Why? Because I do lots of audio using lots of disc I/O and bottlenecks are a total buzzkill.
Apple has been this way for a long time now when it comes to USB. They resisted adding USB for a long time and when they finally did put USB into Macs, PC's were using 2.0 and Apple only offered 1.1. I'm guessing that maybe USB is something that Steve Jobs isn't personally interested in? If other computer manufacturers can use Intel processors and give their users USB 3.0 then I don't understand why Apple couldn't do the same.
What? Apple was the first to offer USB only on the iMacs. At the time that they did, USB 2.0 wasn't out, and while there were a few manufacturers that had started putting one or at best two USB ports on their computers, those ports were rarely used, since even keyboards and mice continued to be PS/2 on the PC. Apple pushed the USB standard to popularity, but they don't feel that adding USB 3.0 is worth adding an extra chip to their board at this time. I don't see the problem, really. Anyone who needs the speed is still going to go FireWire, for a variety of reasons, so the only advantage of USB 3.0 is getting to use certain peripherals for which a FireWire version isn't made at a faster speed than the dog-slow USB 2.0.
jW