On 9/9/05, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I just plugged in a 40 Gb USB drive into my Linux > laptop and the darn thing worked right away! Imagine that! > > How does the speed compare to good ol' IDE hard drives? > > Is USB now slowly going to replace IDE and many PCI cards? > > Chris > ---------------------------------
Well Full Speed USB = 12Mbits/second where Hi-Speed USB = 480Mbits/second. But it all depends on the HD speed of the device itselft.. Technically an Ultra ATA/133 interface maximizes supports data transfer rate up to 133MB/sec. But that all depends on the drive as well. Also I'd say it depends on how many devices you have on your USB bus. If you just have a mouse or something you can probably reach high bus speed up to the speed of the drive. I wouldn't say that USB will take over the internal bus any time soon but there's definately some Evolution coming. P4 with DDR memory = 2.1GB/s across bus. 8x AGP = 2.1GB/s of data a second. So graphics card can kill your bus.ATA 133 HD/Ultra/133 IDE = can overload the PCI bus too. PCI Express 1X = 2.5Gb/s Max bidirectional but average = around 250 MB/s PCI-Express 16X =4GB/s in each direction which is used for graphics cards and I've seen PCI-E 8X used for things like cluster interconnect. I'm not really sure what benefit if any the AMD Hypertransport Architecture could have on a USB controller directly on the motherboard. Definately a gigabit ethernet card is enough to cripple a regular old PCI if you were transferring data that fast. Who knows.....I found some commentart on PCI-E relating to hypertransport and USB etc. actually: http://tinyurl.com/aalvu. I'm guessing USB should take over everything external though I've still had numerous problems from time to time having for example 8 usb devices on a hub. Apparently for example the JTAG programmer I use to program uCs trips out if it's not plugged into the root (my comp), and I've had similar problems with a software protection dongle as well, I'm not really sure why. I guess it certainly makes sense from an economic perspective to unify to one bus. Essentially PCI-E is a serial technology so maybe they could merge with USB's connectivity and scheduling algorithms with the PCI-E form factor and connector, but PCI-E doesn't carry power like USB. I have Power-Over-Ethernet for the VoIP phones in my office so it seems like buses are getting more and more similar though certainly Ethernet is nothing like a local bus and most of the time is integrated onto your motherboard directly. -T -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
