Taz0

January 20, 2011 at 11:00am

First of all, I never said USB 3.0 sucks. It doesn't suck at all, it's just not interesting as far as connecting hard drives go.

Second, SATA, and thus eSATA, is currently at 6 Gb/s, not 3 Gb/s. But let's pretend it doesn't exist.

Third, you've completely missed my point. I didn't say USB3 is slower than SATA 3 Gb/s (which it is, at least with current generation chips), nor did I say that there would be any difference for the user if he used eSATA or USB3, since indeed most of the drives are the bottleneck (lets pretending SSDs don't exist either). What I said was that USB3 is not news at all - it doesn't bring anything new to the table as far as connecting external drives to your computer.

The fact is, for YEARS we've lived with USB2 and eSATA but without USB3, and for YEARS hard drives, even low end ones, have exceeded USB2's to speed (which is nowhere near 480 Mbps, just as USB3's top speed is nowhere near its theoretical max of 4.8 Gbps), and for YEARS the only good way to connect an external hard drive was eSATA.

Now our highly praised savior, USB3 has come to save us from the slow, agonizing transfer rates of USB2. Despite the fact that eSATA served us well for so long and the fact that USB3 is not even an improvement over eSATA, let's ignore all that and listen to the media hype instead: eSATA is dead! All hail the new king - USB3!

You said it yourself, there's no practical speed difference between the two, so why do we need yet another connection type? Why fragment the market?