So, I purchased a Vantec NexStar 3 SuperSpeed (NST-380S3) enclosure, a Samsung EcoGreen F3EG 2TB 5400rpm (HD203WI) drive, and a USB 3 PCI-E controller.

It seems the only shipping USB host controllers the moment all use NEC’s USB 3.0 chip, and almost all the PCI-E boards look alike. They all seem to run in the $25-45 range. The great part is Linux supports NEC’s controller as of 2.6.31. The controller worked with no configuration soon as I put the card in.

I chose that specific Samsung drive because it seems to be the only sane 5400 rpm 2TB drive out there. The only other choices were Seagate’s new 5900 rpm drives (which, according to independent reviews on Newegg and enthusiast forums have an unacceptably high failure rate, very unusual of Seagate), and Western Digital’s Caviar Greens (which are 5400 rpm, but suffer from obsessive head parking which is apparently leading to premature drive failure).

Several reviews peg the HD203WI at an average of 90mb/sec writes for sequential writing, or about 2-3x the speed of USB 2.0.

mkfs.ext4 took 7:44 minutes to create the file system (while iotop confirmed it was doing in excess of 100mb/sec writes for much of the process), and hdparm -t /dev/sdx also indicates the drive in this enclosure can push 100mb/sec.

After writing to the drive for an hour straight, the enclosure is warm but not hot, and after removing the drive from the enclosure, the drive itself is warm; this is compared to the Seagate 7200.12s in my RAID 5 array which could burn you at this point.

Many drives fail in enclosures because they overheat; I don’t think this will happen due to Vantec’s thick aluminum design in the NexStar series enclosures, and the fact that the HW203WI has low power usage.

After formatting with ext4, the file system uses 29GB out of 1.82TB total. Its kind of funny when I’ve owned drives smaller than the space consumed by an empty file system.

I’m rather happy with my purchases overall.

Normally, this wouldn’t be an issue, items are sometimes DOA, it happens. I’ve had a few things over the years that were DOA, and the manufacturer promptly replaced the item….. however Targus expects me to pay for the shipping to send it back to the factory. Need I remind you, this is still in warranty (as it is less than a week old), and they sold the item (through Newegg) in the first place.

Here is the email from Targus about my query on having my warranty honored, which by the way, it took them almost a week to answer. The last paragraph is the most damning…

Dear Patrick,

I apologize for the delay in servicing your request and greatly appreciate your patience with this matter.

I have created a Return Authorization for you. Your tracking number is (edited out)

Please include a copy of this e-mail with your return. Note, if the email is not included, it will delay processing of your replacement.

Name: (edited out)
Company: (edited out)
Street Address: (edited out)
Suite or Apartment Number: (edited out)
City, State, Zip: (edited out)

Phone: (edited out)

If you wish to change anything in the information above, you can update your profile through the “My Stuff” tab on our support page. You can also check the status of your questions or update them there. ((edited out internal URL)).

Please include a copy of this e-mail with your return. Note, if the email is not included, it will delay processing of your replacement.

You are responsible to ship your product to us. As per the Targus replacement procedure, you would have to ship the defective product back to our warehouse with a copy of this email. After receiving the defective product back at our warehouse, the warranty process can take up to 10 business days. Since Targus cannot be held liable for lost or misdirected mail we strongly suggest that you use a trackable method, like UPS. If you are unable to print this email, please include the Reference number on a piece of paper with your name and shipping information.

Warehouse please warranty: ACH63 Super Mini USB 2.0 4-Port Hub (1)
Date of Purchase: 12/11/2007
Place of Purchase: Newegg

Needless to say, I am contacting Newegg over this situation because they need to advise customers of future Targus product sales that the company will not honor the warranty in any useful manner.

Update: Newegg replaced the hub, and the new one works fine. I refuse to recommend Targus products due to their bad customer service, however.

Enclosure: My old drive is now in an Icydock MB663UB 2.5″ enclosure, and through Newegg right now its $8.99 total until December 31st. The enclosure is basically a box of high grade aluminum, with no wiggle room inside (touches drive on all four sides), and is only a tiny bit longer than the drive itself. Although it has a built in 2 inch USB cable, it also comes with a two-headed several foot cable for non-mobile applications (or for drives that won’t spinup in under 500mA). Its the best HD enclosure I’ve ever owned, in my opinion.

Memory: I’ve upgraded the Powerbook’s memory from 1GB to 2GB, and I have to say, Leopard runs a lot smoother… not that it is noticeably slower than Tiger, but its like a new machine with more memory. Between the new HD and the more memory, booting takes about half the time (not that I often do that, sleep is damned useful). 2GB is the maximum on these Powerbooks, otherwise I would have gone for more.

VNC: Leopard 10.5.1 has “fixed” the VNC bug to an extent… connecting with x2vnc no longer makes AppleVNCServer crash, but it just makes it chew all available CPU time and barely work. This does not happen using an normal VNC user (less than 10% CPU time on average), but I expect x2vnc is doing something weird that it should be.

Smallest USB hub: Powerbooks only have 2 USB ports, and I have at least three devices I want to plug into it… so I bought a hub just for the Powerbook: a hub that happens to be smaller than 2 by 2 by 0.5 inches, Targus ACH63US Super Mini Hub. I mean, this thing is damned tiny… its so small, that you could throw it into your spaghetti nest behind your computer and not even know you have a hub. It may be a tad expensive, but I didn’t want yet another box hiding on my desk somewhere… instead, I have it tucked behind my printer (which already has too much stuff behind it). The hub also comes with a two headed cable like the Icydock did, but the heads are far enough apart that they can reach both USB plugs on my Powerbook (one is on one side, one is on the other, instead of both being on the same side… Powerbooks don’t have rear ports).

Oh ho ho! The hub arrived half dead (which soon became totally dead), and Targus is giving me shit over having the hub replaced under warranty.

I originally planned the Powered USB article as two parts, one explaining why USB took off, and another explaining why USB isn’t the best solution because it can’t power large devices plus why Powered USB isn’t the greatest solution either because it isn’t in consumer electronics yet and has the different plugs for different voltages issue as well.

What I didn’t plan on was all the Firewire fans popping up and saying I was wrong for pushing a Powered USB/USB 3 combo. For the record, I’m also a Firewire fan but haven’t gone to the fanatical levels some people have. Part 3 is for you guys.

Note: I originally intended for USB 3 and New Powered USB to be separate standards, allowing devices to use one or both (but New Powered USB would require USB 3 to negotiate for power usage). The way I will describe this possible future USB 3 in part 3 is basically folding the new data features into the New Powered USB part of the plug to remain compatible with USB 2 hosts/devices/hubs.

The problem with traditional USB is because:

1. It’s slow.
2. Can’t allow devices to perform the DMA-like transfer method Firewire does¹.
3. It’s slow.
4. Uses polling to transfer data, thus eats CPU time like mad.
5. It’s slow.
6. Future USB specifications cannot perform interrupts to signal for the host to acquire new data, and can only use polling.
7. It’s slow.

Even with these problems, I can still say future USB products look promising because the reason I chose a formalized New Powered USB specification combined with a future USB 3 specification is because almost everyone has USB ports, and it has become the ubiquitous peripheral port on all sorts of devices. Not all devices come in Firewire versions, and not all computers have Firewire ports.

The Proposed USB 3.0 Specification Checklist

USB is being held back by the fact it can’t perform interrupts. USB 3 cannot just add it in the normal USB host interface stack: USB was never designed for it, and you can’t just add it as a feature that can be negotiated between host and client. It wouldn’t work.

However, what would work is adding a second new interface that is slaved to the first: allow USB 3 devices to negotiate to use this new second interface, and allow the second interface to work independently of the original legacy interface. This secondary interface could not only perform interrupts, but be able to do anything USB 2 is missing.

There are two reasons you need the independency: one, USB 3 hubs need to be able to transfer data from both legacy USB 2 devices and USB 3 devices (all the USB 2 data will be going across the legacy bus independently of USB 3 data); and two, USB 3 devices will no longer be using the legacy interface for any data transferring once the negotiation is complete. The legacy interface will act as an out-of-band interface for non-important USB-related traffic (such as for re-negotiation, or for negotiation of/for USB 3 clients plugged into USB 3 hubs, or for just telling the host it’s still plugged in).

This second interface, since it is now independent, can virtually use any protocol it wishes. If the USB Working Group so decided, they could run Firewire unmodified over this second interface. The possibilities are endless. Most likely, it’d be some USB-IF designed Firewire clone.

There is something else I need to add to this checklist: USB 2 legacy communicaiton with USB 3 hosts and clients. As I said, USB 3 devices would have to negotiate to use the secondary interface, but what happens if either the host, client, or hub rejects this?

USB 3 clients will have to be able to do their work as standard USB 2 devices. Obviously, high bandwidth applications would run a lot slower, DV devices might not be able to be used in real-time, and Powered USB power features couldn’t be negotiated for (most likely the USB 2 client/host/hub would be using a normal USB plug in the first place). USB 3 hubs connected to USB 2 hosts would have to reject USB 3 connections as well and tell any USB 3 clients connected to the hub to run in USB 2 mode.

More pins doesn’t exactly mean a new data connector

Of course, this second interface requires more pins, yet has to stay compatible with the old USB plug. Frankly, doing what Firewire 800 did (adding a 9-pin socket/plug that requires an adapter to plug 6-pin devices/plug into 6-pin hosts) is possibly a bad idea as it requires people to have yet another small part that is easy to lose. Adapter dongles and short adapter cables suck.

The idea I’ve been playing around with is to attach these new pins to the consumer-friendly New Powered USB plug I hinted at in part 2 of this article. Just add, say, four or six pins to the outside of the plug’s inner column like how Type B USB plugs work now, while leaving the power pins on the inside of the column like the are in the original design. Remember, these pins are for data only, all three Firewire plug designs only use two pairs for data.

However the plug actually gets designed, I don’t care; it just has to be done in a way that doesn’t interfere with the legacy USB plug. Putting the new data pins in the New Powered USB half of the connector seems to be the ideal way of solving this without going Firewire’s route.

So thats it? Just clone Firewire’s features?

The two main things that Firewire has over USB at this time is the fact that Firewire devices can use interrupts (which, if you haven’t figured it out yet, is causing Firewire 400 to actually hit 400mbps, and USB2 to hit about half of it’s 480mbps), and the fact that Firewire can power devices that are more power hungy, is why, in theory, Firewire is the better bus.

But as I said before, USB is the defacto standard for peripheral communication, and Firewire is in far fewer devices, and some computers don’t even have Firewire ports. As much as I’d like to see Firewire kill USB, it is not going to happen any time soon.

So yes, what I’m saying is USB 3′s secondary interface has to either copy Firewire’s features or use Firewire directly. Firewire can’t kill USB, USB is having a hard time killing Firewire, so the only way I see this problem being solved is by allowing USB 3 to do everything Firewire does now while still remaining compatible with USB 2 devices and hosts.

_{[1]: On some platforms it really does turn into a PCI DMA and allows you to read/write part or all of the system memory, such as for live debugging purposes on another machine. I’d like to see this on USB 3 as well.}

The Universal Serial Bus, or USB, is right now the most common serial peripheral bus in existence. Allowing all the most common devices to connect to your computer, to each other, through hubs, and now even wireless USB has become the dominant method of low bandwidth communications between devices and their peripherals.

However, USB is not without flaws, in fact, it has tons of issues that other less accepted standards have already solved, and USB has either not solved them or solved them only recently. One of those problems is that, although USB does provide electrical power to peripherals, it is rarely enough to run devices that suck juice like no tomorrow. Powered USB exists to solve this problem.

I will tell you why Powered USB will never be widely accepted, and also why we need it. However, to do so, this article is split into two three parts: the first part discusses the history of USB and previous peripheral ports, and why it it became widely accepted, the second part contains the meat of my argument on why Powered USB is both needed, yet failing to be accepted, and the third part describes a possible future USB 3 specification in detail.

This is part 2. Part 1 is available here, and part 3 is available here.

Short Introduction to Powered USB

At the end of Part 1, I said USB does not provide enough power for certain devices, a total of 2.5 watts at 5 volts. This is enough for any device that uses little power: keyboards, mice, USB flash keys, etc, etc. Compared to Firewire 400, which can provide similar data transfer performance to USB 2.0, devices can use up to 45 watts at 30 volts.

Powered USB can output 144 watts at 24 volts, 72 watts at 12 volts, and 30 watts at 5 volts (all at 6 amps current), while Firewire does up to 45 watts at up to 30 volts (1.5 amps current), and USB 1.1 and 2.0 does 2.5 watts at 5 volts (500mA of current).

According to recent comments of this article, my original math was wrong: at 24 volts Powered USB only provides three times more power than Firewire, and at 5 volts Powered USB provides five times more power than normal USB.

In Firewire 400 against USB 2.0, Firewire comes out as the better bus for many devices due to the fact that it can supply enough power to, for example, run a two or three drive enclosure or an external DVD burner; not only that, it does perform better than USB 2.0 for data transfers due to the fact you can never get 480mbps transfers in the real world, only around 240 to 360mbps, whereas on Firewire 400 you really can get to 400mbps.

Firewire, for devices that require power and bandwidth, gives USB 2.0 a severe beat down but has trouble taking on Powered USB.

Don’t understand how much power 144 watts at 24 volts is? You can drive printers, scanners, large RAID enclosures, multiple DVD burners for parallel/mass burning, even medium sized LCD monitors. You could drive a pair of large speakers with this much power in addition to sending them digital sound to play.

As you can see in the image, the top part of the plug is the power plug combined with the bottom part of the plug that is a standard USB data plug. This power plug’s power output not being standardized is where everything goes wrong.

The plug did it with the crowbar in the library

The Powered USB specification manages the second half of this (very ugly) plug, where all the extra power comes from. According to the specification, you may have different layouts of power pins to supply 5, 12, or 24 volts, and each plug can only do one of the three.

Can you imagine how confusing this would be to end users? Powered USB has gone back to the days of having incompatible but similar functioning ports on the same computer. Had problems telling your grandmother about PS/2 and SCSI ports, and why she can’t plug her printer into either? Now tell her why she can’t plug her PUSB-5v device into a PUSB-12v plug.

USB does need a powered extension to compete with and possibly eliminate Firewire. I have a dozen devices that have separate power cords and power bricks and it makes for cable spaghetti behind my computer. If all my devices supported some sane future form of Powered USB, I’d lose at least four or five of these power cords.

So how can this be fixed?

For New Powered USB to move forward to the home desktop, I envision that both the USB Working Group and the Powered USB Working Group needs to release new versions of their specifications. First, Powered USB needs a new version (lets call it New Powered USB): they have to standardize on one voltage. I suggest using 12 volts, or use a floating voltage design like Firewire does (12 to 30 volts instead of 30 volts fixed), as this would be most beneficial to devices that require high voltages.

Second, I suggest the USB Working Group should release USB 3.0 already. As I mentioned before in this article, Firewire 400 is marginally faster than USB 2.0, however what I did not mention is that Firewire 800 is about three times faster than USB 2.0 and is already available in a couple devices. I expect to be able to do at least 800mbps or 1600mbps of real performance (akin to USB 2.0′s 240-360mbps real performance) or even more.

Third, I suggest that power strips (the kind you plug your computer into) add USB to New Powered USB bridges that simply pass the USB data over, but add the power pins and power the devices directly from the power strip. Adding these plugs would allow people to power new devices with older computers or with smaller devices (ultra-small laptops, PDAs, etc) that can’t power devices on their own.

With these three suggestions, I can bet you that New Powered USB would become a common home standard, and at least part of the cable spaghetti problem would go away, and I can also bet you that Firewire might also disappear as well.

Continue to part 3.

The Universal Serial Bus, or USB, is right now the most common serial peripheral bus in existence. Allowing all the most common devices to connect to your computer, to each other, through hubs, and now even wireless USB has become the dominant method of low bandwidth communications between devices and their peripherals.

However, USB is not without flaws, in fact, it has tons of issues that other less accepted standards have already solved, and USB has either not solved them or solved them only recently. One of those problems is that, although USB does provide electrical power to peripherals, it is rarely enough to run devices that suck juice like no tomorrow. Powered USB exists to solve this problem.

I will tell you why Powered USB will never be widely accepted, and also why we need it. However, to do so, this article is split into two three parts: the first part discusses the history of USB and previous peripheral ports, and why it it became widely accepted, the second part contains the meat of my argument on why Powered USB is both needed, yet failing to be accepted, and the third part describes a possible future USB 3 specification in detail.

This is part 1. Part 2 is available here, and part 3 is available here.

Short History of Common Yet Totally Incompatible Peripheral Bus Implementations

Way back at the beginning of time, before Pentiums, before laptops, even before CDs, there was the IBM PC. Although not the first of its kind, it was the first home computer that took off, and along side it riding the new technology boom was the Apple II.

That said, the IBM PC had something unique for its day: a keyboard that wasn’t built into the case. The plug this keyboard used was typically called the AT keyboard port¹, named after the IBM PC-AT family of computers. This plug was about a half an inch in diameter, round, and had 5 pins.

This wasn’t the only peripheral socket that IBM PCs had. Some had serial ports (using the RS-232 9-pin or 25-pin standards) going by the name of COM ports. Also featured on some IBM PCs was the Centronics parallel port (using a DB-25 style plug) going by the name of LPT or Printer ports.

So, now, we have three plugs on the IBM PC: one for your keyboard, one for low bandwidth devices (such as dial-up modems and mice when they came into the picture), and one for high bandwidth devices (such as printers, or Iomega Zip drives and external CD burners when those showed up). Does it end there? No.

A bit of time later, Creative Labs added a Joystick/MIDI dual function port on their SoundBlaster series of sound cards. IBM added a new pair of ports called PS/2 ports that used two small quarter-inch 6 pin plugs for the keyboard and mouse (replacing the AT keyboard and serial mouse combo). External SCSI showed up allowing SCSI drives in special external enclosures, and even some document scanners used SCSI as well.

Notice up to this point I have only written about the IBM PC. The Apple II I mentioned earlier had it’s own series of plugs that served the same exact functions. Apple II series computers had serial ports (not including the standard RS-232 serial ports which were compatible), ports for external floppy drives, ports for joysticks, ports for external hard drives. Macs shipped with the Apple Desktop Bus (ADB) for keyboards and mice, and the Apple IIGS shipped with ADB ports as well (in fact, before Macs did, although the Mac design team invented ADB).

None of the ports on the same machine were compatible with each other, and (except for external SCSI and RS-232 serial) none of the ports that served the same function that were used on IBM PCs and Apple computers were compatible with each other either. Confusing, isn’t it?

So, by the mid 1990s, there were a multitude of plugs all serving essentially the same tasks over and over, and all of them doing it incompatibly. USB was born for one specific purpose: to get rid of all these different ports and combine them into one big peripheral plug standard.

One Port To Rule Them All

In 1996, the USB Working Group brought forth USB, the best thing to happen to computer peripheral design in a long time, and within 5 years most if not all of the devices I mentioned before were using USB. You could get keyboards, mice, joysticks, printers, scanners, external media drives, external hard drives, dial-up modems, and a hundred other things with USB plugs.

Now you could build a computer with only two or three kinds of plugs and never have to worry about how to explain to your grandmother what the difference between SCSI and PS/2 is and why she can’t plug her new printer into either of them.

By 1998, all Apple Macintoshes² were also shipping with USB, and they dropped the legacy ADB design as well. By 2000, some computers were shipping with hardly any legacy ports at all, and laptops went down to the bare minimum of two or four USB plugs with a parallel port (due to the corporate world still having tons of really old printers and that they wouldn’t replace until they stopped functioning) and sometimes PS/2 plugs if you were lucky.

The USB designers did foresee you wanting to use your old devices, however: there are USB converters for parallel port, serial port, PS/2 port, and SoundBlaster joystick devices so you never have to leave devices behind if you don’t want to. In addition, there are port converters for almost any other simple type of device out there, so USB really opened the doors for this sort of thing; the icing on the cake, of course, was when someone made converters to turn controllers from virtually any classic or current game system into USB gamepads.

USB Fixed Problems

USB solved a very important problem: we had too many competing plug designs. Not only was it confusing for end users, it was costly. Why have six plugs of all unique designs, when you can have six plugs of all the same superior design?

USB also solved another very important problem: when you have four plugs, you will have eight or more devices to plug in. The USB standard added concentrator hubs to allow the end user to plug a bunch of devices into a single plug and have all the devices work normally.

USB, while on a roll, partially fixed a third very important problem: some devices require a small amount of power, and it’s a hassle to run yet another cable to an AC adapter (for laptops in the field, this wouldn’t even be possible). USB provides some power to devices, up to a half an amp at 5 volts. You can run almost anything on this except traditionally large devices like printers, some scanners, external media drives, and hard drive enclosures³; those require external power supplies. In addition, though this wasn’t intended when the USB Working Group designed USB, some devices recharge their batteries via USB, including a brand of AA batteries that they themselves recharge over USB.

This partial fix of the third problem is where Powered USB comes in.

Read part 2.

_{[1]: The IBM PC-AT was the second generation of IBM PCs. The first generation, although using the same exact plug for the keyboard, did not have compatible keyboard types.}

_{[2]: I’d like to say thanks to Steve Jobs, for if it wern’t for Macs pushing USB, they wouldn’t have become popular on PCs; before that, they were only shipping with maybe one or two plugs plus PS/2 keyboards and mice.}

_{[3]: This is not entirely true. There are a couple USB hard drive enclosures for 3.5″ hard drives that use 2 plugs to get 1 amp, and most 2.5″ drive enclosures run on half an amp (usually) fine. It is considered a bad hack to use the two plug method required by drive enclosures, and I suggest if your enclosure offers the use of an AC adapter, use it.}