Anyone have experience with USB 3?

[StinkyPinky]

Currently I have a slow ass USB 2 external drive. I'm looking for more speed. My motherboard currently also supports eSata and Firewire 400.

Firewire is barely any faster, and while eSata looks tempting I'm wondering if USB 3 will render that obsolete in a year or two. Plus I don't think it's plug and play? You need to restart before using it?

Would getting a USB 3 enclosure and USB 3 pci-e add in card be worth the price? For people with experience with USB 3...what is the "real world" performance gain?

 

[klocwerk]

Currently I have a slow ass USB 2 external drive. I'm looking for more speed. My motherboard currently also supports eSata and Firewire 400.

Firewire is barely any faster, and while eSata looks tempting I'm wondering if USB 3 will render that obsolete in a year or two. Plus I don't think it's plug and play? You need to restart before using it?

Would getting a USB 3 enclosure and USB 3 pci-e add in card be worth the price? For people with experience with USB 3...what is the "real world" performance gain?

Many, but not all, eSATA implementations are hot-swappable, check your motherboard chipset.

USB3.0 will be the new standard for drive connections I'm sure, but you're right that it's probably a year out before it's really on most machines. Real world expectations are for USB3.0 to max out around 3.2 gigabits/second after protocol overhead.

For now I'd go eSATA if I were you, and consider that the bottleneck might be the drive and not the connection interface...

 

[RebateMonger]

Hmmm...interesting. Looks like Newegg has several USB 3.0 enclosures, docking stations, PCI-E host cards, and cables.