Remember those nearly pointless USB 3.0 cables one could buy way back in the golden days of April? If you were one of those who bought one by mistake or merely wanted to use its USB 2.0 speed until you had an actual 3.0 device and controller, now is your chance. Buffalo is offering what they claim to be the “world’s first!!” shipping USB 3.0 hard drive in delicious 1TB and 1.5TB flavors come late this month, and a 2TB model is in the works. Since one would obviously need a controller as they don’t come standard on motherboards just yet, the company is also offering one of NEC’s world-firsts: the handy dandy USB 3.0 controller. Together these’ll cost you over US$285 at the very least, but sometimes you just have to have shiny pieces of the world’s first [place name here] before anyone else.
man i cant wait to go out and get this thing and go home to plug it into my new kick butt computer with it’s high speed USB 3.0 por…. wait a minute…
joking aside I am glad were moving in the right direction. though my interst is far more captivated by Light Peak at the moment.
Edited 2009-10-08 21:42 UTC
That’s why Buffalo is also selling a USB 3 controller.
AFAIK the only OS currently supporting USB 3 (in a development branch, I think) is Linux. So only Linux user can use this at a USB 3 speed?
Anyway, I’d never buy anything of a first generation, ever.
Yeah– I’ve only heard about official support on Linux. Maybe the drive comes with one of those pesky driver CDs for Windows? Or better yet– a driver floppy! Yippee.
USB v3 is first-gen? ..i’m baffled!
Then it’s a good job that this is a 2nd generation SATA drive running off a 3rd generation USB protocol
heh, I really hope you two are being sarcastic
Something ridiculous like Firewire 3 will be released and the industry will flock in droves.
FireWire S1600 and S3200 for example?
though IEEE P1394d is more exciting.
Light Peak wil pretty much dominate all though.
and apple kills it with fees
Most of my devices are USB 1.0
they’re probably USB v1.1 actually…
…I always write something like “1.x” so I’m covered.
I would suggest you stick with Firewire. The beauty of that is the little unknown fact by many. If you plug a Firewire 3200 device into a Firewire 800 port, it runs at Firewire 3200 speeds! Why?? Because the firewire implementation sits in the hardware device, not on the PC motherboard. Firewire devices can talk to each other without a PC being involved. eg: You can let your Firewire video recorder talk to a firewire harddrive without the need for a PC.
Much better deal thank you! Plus you don’t have the CPU overhead like you do with USB. Firewire is way better in this regard.
Yeah – it’s so much better, in fact, that you can easily compromise any computer system via this magical firewire port due to it’s direct access to the system memory.
God bless unmanaged ports and all the “features” they bestow
So if I plug my FW800 hard drive into a FW400 port using an adapter cable, will it run at FW800 speed? Or is this functionality only for FW800 and upwards?
And, where did you get this info from? I can’t find it on the Wikipedia page about IEEE 1394..
one word: eSATA 🙂
I want to to that switch too, however it’s not that easy. eSATA ports now come standard with many (higher level) laptops, and PCs.
However it’s very difficult to find eSATA hard drives (at reasonable prices). They are usually marked up (being “DVR extenders”). That’s even true for enclosures.
There is almost no buzz about eSATA in non technical word, but everybody knows USB. If this goes on, unfortunately USB3 will probably take over.
Edited 2009-10-09 17:41 UTC
True, but you can buy your own enclosure. Many enclosure-only products do include esata.
Especially if they can really make it go at least as fast as USB 2.0 (which they claim).
Now they just need to make a practical wireless power source for all of these wireless devices.
Now they just need to make a practical wireless power source for all of these wireless devices.
Well, how do you look at “practical”? There are several wireless electricity techniques, the best of them only require a small device in the wall outlet and an even smaller receiver in the other end. They also don’t seem to have any negative impacts on health or any nearby radio devices, and are very stable. The downside though is that it loses 40% of power in transit over the air…