How Often do You Actually Use USB3?

Zarathustra[H]

Zarathustra[H]

Extremely [H]
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And I'm not talking about plugging legacy/USB2 devices into your USB3 ports.

Do you actually have USB3 devices? How often do you do anything that requires USB3 that would have been slower or wouldn't have worked with USB2?

I'm curious as I just thought of this and realized that since upgrading to my first USB3 compatible system in June I haven't used a USB3 device even once.

I wonder if my experience is typical.

Is USB3 more or less a pointless upgrade over USB2 for the average user?
 
In a word, yes. The majority of people use USB for devices such as mice, keyboards, printers, phone connections, charging, and webcams. For any of these applications, USB 2.0 speeds are more than sufficient.

The only real advantage USB 3.0 offers is for data transfer to/from external drives. However, most desktop users also have several terabytes of HDD space internally through SATA, which is still faster.

I've been using my USB 3.0 mainly for a USB 3.0 Flash Drive, which allows me to very quickly move 1080p movie files over a dozen gigs large from my computer to the drive, which I then plug into my TV in the living room to watch.
 
transferring 3TB archives from external onto a networked computer would be painful at USB2 speeds
 
Considering I rarely use usb storage anymore, I've found myself unable to justify buying any USB3 storage devices when I've already got a plethora of perfectly serviceable USB2 flash and hard drives - which mostly get used for installing Windows (flash drives) and backups (hard drives). Neither of these applications would significantly benefit from USB3 since my case the backups are a set-and-forget process anyway.
 
Depends on the application...my cousin got a USB 3.0 flash drive to copy stuff from other PC's and what not and I'm like "Only your main PC has USB 3.0...the rest are 2.0...so what's the point?". His response was that it was like a dollar more than the 2.0 version so, yeah, I can see his point there.

I know for me all my external hard drives are eSATA so USB 3.0 just isn't needed right now personally.

Maybe some day in the future!
 
I will comment that a relative of mine got a Corsair GT USB3 Voyager for Christmas and the write speeds are still capped by the hardware - around ~25 MB/s or so at best - while the read speeds jump from ~35 MB/s to ~85 MB/s going from USB2 to USB3. Nice, but kind of the reverse of what you'd ideally want if only your main machine has USB3.
 
i dont have any yet, my corsair m90 should be arriving soon and it supports usb3, but i highly doubt i will see any real world gameplay improvements due to that feature.
 
I do not own any USB 3 devices, besides my motherboard that is.

I could see it useful for hard drives, fast flash drives, even camera's and phones, anything with a large block of data that could be transferred faster.

It would be nice if my iPad had USB 3. Minor changes dont take all that long, a full sync with a lot of music and video can make me wait a bit.
 
I don't have a USB 3.0 motherboard but I do have an external USB 3.0 drive. The transfer rate is very slow but I only transfer data maybe once a month. However, my next motherboard will be USB 3.0 compatible.
 
techie81 said:
I don't have a USB 3.0 motherboard but I do have an external USB 3.0 drive. The transfer rate is very slow but I only transfer data maybe once a month. However, my next motherboard will be USB 3.0 compatible.
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That's cause you aren't getting usb 3.0 speeds...
 
I use USB3.0 all the time. Mostly for my HTPC which has an external USB3.0 for storing DVDs and recorded TV. And every now and then I'll bring the external drive to my main rig and back things up on it.
 
I have a USB3.0 flash drive that I use to transfer files over to my HTPC. It's faster than 2.0 for sure, so I'd say it's pretty useful
 
I have a 2TB WD MyBook USB 3.0 drive that I use as a backup now.
Was using it as an online drive but I don't really need it for that purpose anymore.
 
I have an external USB 3 HDD and back up to it weekly via USB 3. It used to take all night; now it's done in an hour or two.
 
I have several usb 3.0 backup devices and HDD hubs. I also have a usb3.0 hub/card reader. One of my PCs has 7 usb plugs. I use usb3.0 whenever I can.
 
I use USB3 flash drives and external hdd's all the time for backing up, reinstalling and moving large files between pc's. Transferring large files and/or folders with thousands of small files would take hours on usb2 vs minutes with usb3.

For normal devices, non-storage related usb2 is fine.
 
I've been using eSATA for external drives for a while now, and firewire before that, because USB 2.0 was so useless for moving large amounts of data. I could see the need for faster USB especially with the size of hard drives now, though eSATA is probably still the better solution if you're doing this on a regular basis.
 
So far I've only used it to transfer movies to my Transformer. I thought it would charge via 3.0 too, but have yet to see it actually work. Might be a driver issue though. I have definitely noticed a huge jump in speed, so it's not entirely an early-adoption gimmick. I do also plan to get an external 3.0 drive for backups of my Gaming/OC Test Rig, but I'm not in a huge hurry to do that at the moment. Bottom line is that for now I'm not unhappy that my mobo doesn't have any 3.0 headers for a front panel setup =P
 
USB 3 externals had just started to become affordable when the hard drive shortage struck. That is the primary use for USB3. I think there are very few people who buy a USB3 dock/enclosure, IME most of them tend to use eSata instead.

The situation will change this year when Intel finally includes native USB3 support and hopefully we will stop seeing any legacy USB2 ports on mobo's and more importantly on case front panels/laptops.
 
I use usb 3.0 as much as possible got a 1tb external usb 3.0 drive when they came out and the speed difference is awesome
 
I have a USB3 external drive and I use it to transfer large files perhaps once every two or three weeks? I can tell a speed difference.

Mostly though I got USB3 because I was building a new computer and figured it'd be smart to include for the future. I didn't make a specific effort to upgrade to it, though I did make sure my most recent External Drive purchase was USB3 compatible.
 
I don't ever use usb 3.0. I have a butt load of flash drives and can't bring myself to buy a usb 3.0 drive since I have probably 60gb in flash drives already.
 
I have a Samsung USB3 external HDD. Its a massive improvement. I'm constantly using it to back up files, or sync my work PC with my home PC, quite often use it to transfer Steam games to my friend's PC since he has crappy internet and doesn't want to download them. I've always bought reasonably fast USB2 drives, since I had some bad experiences with slow and cheap ones, but this HDD is more than twice as fast as any of my USB2 drives and it makes a huge difference when transferring large amounts of large files.

The only downside is not all PCs still have USB3, so even though its fast to transfer to/from my PC, if someone else's PC doesn't have it, it ends up just as slow as USB2, which is downright painful after you just transfered the files at USB3 speeds :p
 
Tudz said:
The only downside is not all PCs still have USB3, so even though its fast to transfer to/from my PC, if someone else's PC doesn't have it, it ends up just as slow as USB2, which is downright painful after you just transfered the files at USB3 speeds :p
Click to expand...

At least its only slow on one trip, not both. As slow as USB2 is, that counts for something.
 
Right now I have only a 2TB external hard drive that uses USB 3.0. I use this drive fairly often for video backups.
 
MrCrispy said:
The situation will change this year when Intel finally includes native USB3 support and hopefully we will stop seeing any legacy USB2 ports on mobo's and more importantly on case front panels/laptops.
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It looks like panther point (the chipset coming out alongside ivy bridge) will only have four USB3 ports. Some motherboard vendors may add additional controllers or hubs but I would expect most boards to have at least some 2.0 ports and cheaper boards to still be mostly USB2 with a couple of USB3 ports on the back and a couple of USB3 ports on a header for the front (as many boards are now).

Laptops OTOH often have four or less external USB ports anyway so I'd expect to see laptops with all ports 3.0 in the not too distant future.
 
I use UBS3 on the daily basis, but i do transfer a lot of large files.... but i only need 2 USB3 at the most. Im fine with all others bieng usb2.
 
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