USB - The Current status of this essential of Modern Computing

The earth's spin is slowing down. The amount of time it takes to make one full rotation to make what we call a "day" takes a little longer each "year". The leap seconds are an adjustment made by humans to keep our clocks in sync with the "rising" of the sun, so sunrise doesn't happen later in the "day".

TVeblen said:

The earth's spin is slowing down

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That's because too many people only travel... west.
The English, coming to the Americas. The gold rush (go west young man). People vacationing in Hawaii or the Far East.
It's been going on for centuries. We're slowing the planet's spin.






Whoops... I got that backwards I think. LOL
If peeps only traveled west, it would speed the planet up.

Well, I'm only on my first cup of tea.


The planet spins... west to east. That's why the UK has breakfast ~six hours before we do.
So movement west would speed the planet up... and movement east would slow it down.

I thought it was because of windmills.

TVeblen said:

I thought it was because of windmills.

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I think you're right. They must all be pointed east.
Wait... I'm not sure it works with wind mills.
They're not pushing air... the air is pushing on them.
And because the blades can turn, most of that push isn't getting transferred to the ground.
It gets transferred to the mill stone or the generator.

Now it would work with fans. If all fans were pointed east, and turned ON... that would slow the planet down.



On a side note... the book "Flatland" written in the 1800's by a mathematician (no math in the book), is a thought experiment about... the different dimensions. Awesome book. It will seriously change how you see things.

Book: Flatland


It's about the size of a Cliff-Notes book. It can be read in about 2-3 hours.

CountMike said:

It's all about what you are using computer for. Chasing technology just for sake of it means you'll never catch up. There's always a generation or two waiting for them to make enough money of last one and than spring out "New and improved".

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At the same time, there comes a time when you have no real choice.

I built my Core2Quad machine in 2008. In 2011 I was forced to use a lot of new stuff when that C2Q was hit by lightning, which took out the HDDs, the PSU, and the mobo. The rig I built in 2011 I finally replaced in 2020. And even then, it's not 100% new - a video card here, monitors there ....

So, that's 5 complete systems I've built from scratch with almost no device carryover from a previous machine over 28 years.

I think that fairly qualifies for "rarely" build a new machine.

Ghot said:

On a side note... the book "Flatland" written in the 1800's by a mathematician (no math in the book), is a thought experiment about... the different dimensions. Awesome book. It will seriously change how you see things.

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Being out of copyright now, it's available free from Project Gutenberg

What a fascinating dialog I missed out on during the forest fire evacuation in May.

Well, in light of the lead post... I'm giving up on that too. I'm giving up on being a bleeding edge enthusiast, I'm giving up on TPM, I'm giving up on Optane, I'm giving up on IRST, I'm giving up on TBMT, I'm giving up on Intel and while I'm at it I might as well give up on waiting for USB4 cards to come out. Which means I will be stuck with this plethora of various USB "standards" USB 3.0 not existing anymore because it's USB 3.1 and USB 3.1 magically and instantaneously transforming into USB 3.2 while my drivers for USB continually keep overdosing on driver updates that only work some times while I consistently keep getting messages about how "this device can run faster" blah, blah, blah.

I give up.

Bree said:

Being out of copyright now, it's available free from Project Gutenberg

Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin Abbott Abbott

Free kindle book and epub digitized and proofread by volunteers.

www.gutenberg.org

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Please, Bree. Don't tell us you're a flat earther. I can only handle so much trauma.

Scannerman said:

Please, Bree. Don't tell us you're a flat earther. I can only handle so much trauma.

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LOL. It has nothing to do with... flat earthers.

Ghot said:

LOL. It has nothing to do with... flat earthers.

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*whew* This is good to know. I'm having enough trouble as it is trying to reconcile the second book in the Dream Void series. Or wait.. I think it's the third : Evolutionary Void by Peter F Hamilton. The protagonist kills his own grandson. Man, I lost it there... Hope I didn't spoil anything mentioning this. Too many universes to keep track of!

It's flat land, not flat earth... I think he means Holland. Holland is flat. Lots of windmills there too. And craziness. With all the blades of those windmills hitting hard against their head the whole... err, you know... time.

hdmi said:

It's flat land, not flat earth... I think he means Holland. Holland is flat. Lots of windmills there too. And craziness. With all the blades of those windmills hitting hard against their head the whole... err, you know... time.

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I had a friend from Holland with dual citizenship. He was an amazing fellow. His name was Percy. A true genius of a fellow who studied vortexes. We would stay up all night discussing physics and time/space continuums. The man was brilliant and light years ahead of me, but he had patience and took the time to explain things to me. I miss him dearly. Farewell, Droogie... wherever you are!

barman58 said:

I have noticed that there is a lot of confusion surrounding USB and its formats and what performance you should expect from your cables and the ports they plug into ..

Rather than pages of text with the occasional diagram I have found this Video which clarifies the current situation and also includes information of what to expect next in this field

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Back to the lead post. Chris Barnatt is literally a gentleman and a scholar. I love his videos as he puts things so succinctly even a moron like myself can comprehend what he's saying. I'll condone his overly optimistic views as a futurist simply because he is polite and kind. (BTW "condone" means to overlook. The word is so grossly misused.) I was excited about USB4 for years until it never really showed up. I was hoping it would be the final solution (dare I use the term?) to all this USB nonsense. It's looking like this will not be the case. Anyway, big fan of Chris here. If you're not into the futurist ideology it might be a good idea to keep away from his other channel. (Just sayin'.)

johnlgalt said:

At the same time, there comes a time when you have no real choice.

I built my Core2Quad machine in 2008. In 2011 I was forced to use a lot of new stuff when that C2Q was hit by lightning, which took out the HDDs, the PSU, and the mobo. The rig I built in 2011 I finally replaced in 2020. And even then, it's not 100% new - a video card here, monitors there ....

So, that's 5 complete systems I've built from scratch with almost no device carryover from a previous machine over 28 years.

I think that fairly qualifies for "rarely" build a new machine.

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That's not bad! My two in 22 is a fair account, but it excludes the one I built from scratch and eventually gave to the wife. All the rest were builds that I made for others and I kept no count of this. Also not included are the multitudes of Frankensteined PCs and laptops I've thrown together, old PCs that I've rescued from dumpsters, PCs that people have given to me (often just because they were old or didn't want to bother fixing them) and my brand new Dell PITA pre-build laptop. My very first laptop was put together from 4 different discarded ACER PCs and I had to order the keyboard for it from China. That laptop is still alive today and my daughter guards it fiercely. It runs Windows 10 on an i5 chip. That laptop pretty much saved our bacon when we had to evacuate due to a forest fire this year. From scratch for myself is very rare indeed.

Oh lol - yeah, I'm not counting builds made for others, that starts hitting triple digits. I used to try to piece together older PCs but after having nowhere to put them, nor nothing to really do on them, I settled down a bit and started relegating them to storage.

When I built my home 4 years ago, I made a concerted effort to get rid of anything older than the Core i7 965 EE based machine, but I found recently that I still have crazy things like a really, really old PCI AIC for IDE ports, among other things. Oops. Lol.

I thought about recycling laptops at one time or another, but having worked on so many of them, and not really liking to use them, personally, I just keep buying 3-4 year old laptops cheaply and keeping them around for those Justin Case moments like you mention - good to have, but never, ever going to be my daily driver.

I hear ya, my brutha fruma nutha mutha. The Missuz made me put the brakes on when the basement started filling up and she was running out of room for her yarn. (We actually keep yarn in the fridge in our basement.) We both have our indulgences. We both help each other to behave.

My old rule was to dispose of anything that passed two decades, but that didn't help much as IDE was still a thing in 2004. Now I'm using RAM as an indicator. If it won't even work with DDR2 or higher it goes to recycling. I still have a crate full of IDE stuff to dispose of but I'm slowly chiselling it down. Justin Case is a good friend of mine.

Actually, this is what prompted me to build PCs from old parts and give them to kids that don't have a computer. So far it's been working pretty good and she-who-must-be-obeyed is pleased with this choice.

My issue with USB at this point is buy supposedly fast drives from Amazon or so i thought, Sandisk 256GB Dual Drive, and Another Sandisk 256GB flash drive (that one took over 9 hours to transfer a bit of Files lol--sure they were Small Files, but still should've been a little faster i would've hoped

Guess next drive i purchase hopefully will be faster lol

Yes i have the 2nd drive set for Better Performance, but Write Caching was not supported)

Windows 11 Pro, Intel I7 10700 on Gigabyte B460M_DS3H Rev 1.0, (All Drivers up to date as far as i can tell) System performs good otherwise in everything i do

bikemanI7 said:

My issue with USB at this point is buy supposedly fast drives from Amazon or so i thought, Sandisk 256GB Dual Drive, and Another Sandisk 256GB flash drive (that one took over 9 hours to transfer a bit of Files lol--sure they were Small Files, but still should've been a little faster i would've hoped

Guess next drive i purchase hopefully will be faster lol

Yes i have the 2nd drive set for Better Performance, but Write Caching was not supported)

Windows 11 Pro, Intel I7 10700 on Gigabyte B460M_DS3H Rev 1.0, (All Drivers up to date as far as i can tell) System performs good otherwise in everything i do

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Do you have any USB 3.0 ? Just kidding but, USB 3.1 or USB 3.2 even Gen 1 should be faster than what you just described.
I bought two Patriot Rage prime 250 GB and they run at blazing fast speeds. Yes, they are USB3.2 but, have a sustained transfer rate
of at least 600MB/s and with better performance and write cache it climbs to 1.2 Gb/s and I do have the proof if you need it.

Yes i have plenty of USB 3.0 Devices, and a few USB 3.2 Gen 1 Devices, It very well could be my cheap USB 3.2 Gen 1 hub acting up, but then again that Sandisk drive was very slow

This is the Drive

Tested drive on laptop as well--was still slow
Tried Type A option of it, and Type C on the Laptop--no difference, still took 8-9 hours to do the full transfer lol

Folder size 27.8GB



Guess will just have to try another drive or buy another better drive when i can

bikemanI7 said:

Yes i have plenty of USB 3.0 Devices, and a few USB 3.2 Gen 1 Devices, It very well could be my cheap USB 3.2 Gen 1 hub acting up, but then again that Sandisk drive was very slow

This is the Drive

https://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-256GB-Ultra-Drive-Type-C/dp/B06XC1WGQR/ref=sr_1_5?keywords=Sandisk+dual+drive&qid=1698716610&sr=8-5

Guess will just have to try another drive or buy another better drive when i can

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What you should be looking for is Write speed and not read speed. Memory will read allot faster than write and especially
with better performance and write caching, you can get very good performance from a middle of the road USB drive if you look
at the write speed instead.

This is what I get with a USB 3.2 Gen 2. with the Patriot.
This is with write caching


This is without



haven't tried it with the slower USB 3.2 Gen 1 but, as I said, the write speed is what you're after.