Every notebook has USB 2 -- but a few are starting to appear with USB 3. We answer the question: is the price premium worth it?
The Universal Serial Bus (USB) is a connector that everybody needs. We use it every day for connecting printers, modems and speakers, but most importantly we all use it for USB memory keys, the replacement for the humble floppy disk. Every notebook on the market today sports one or more USB 2.0 ports, but the new kid on the block, USB3.0, is starting to show up but is it worth the price premium?
USB3.0 works the same way as the existing USB2.0 ports, but much, much faster. Theoretically up to 10x the speed, but in reality the difference isn’t so great. Our testing with new USB 3.0 hard disk drives show that you can triple the speed of transferring data to and from external hard disk drives and memory keys.
Before you dump all your memory keys and start spending big on USB 3.0 models, it is worthwhile noting that all USB2.0 devices, including your printer, storage units and headphones will all work with USB3.0. It’s fully backward compatible, so there’s no need to replace existing devices just quite yet.
As USB3.0 ports on notebooks today are provided by a third party chip, there’s a price premium attached to adding it in to a particular model. Considering that you’ll also need to invest in new external hard disk drives or memory keys to take advantage of this new speed, it isn’t a budget solution.
What it does give you though is the fastest transfer speeds around. We tested an ASUS N61J notebook (pictured above) with a USB3.0 port provided by an NEC internal chip, a common solution on both desktops and notebooks. In to this notebook we plugged in a LaCie Rugged USB 3.0 500 gig hard disk drive. We copied a 700MB test file, around the same size as the amount of data held on a CD.
When the drive was plugged in to the USB 3.0 port, we could copy the entire file in eight seconds. When plugged in to the USB 2.0 port on the same notebook, the copy took 27 seconds. Using a benchmark suite specifically designed to measure the throughput of storage devices, we measured the speed of the drive at 105.2MB/s transfer rate in USB 3.0 and 30.7MB/s when using USB 2.0.
What this shows us is that in real world usage you can transfer files three times faster using a USB 3.0 port and hard disk drive. If you’re a use who needs to constantly move big files around, this can take some serious time off your tasks.
But if you stick to word documents, photos and small amounts of music, then the argument might not be as compelling right at this point in time.
Nick Race
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