Actually a shitload of products have been announced
Actually a shitload of products have been announced
Those don't need any speed. I have a NAS (made out of a desktop) that runs RAID 0 SATA drives and the best I can get is about 50MB/s reads (something like 440mbps) that falls quite neatly within even USB 2 spec. Really only things that could use the bandwidth would be high speed flash drives or high end video equipment. Neither are all that critical at consumer level at this time.
Apple has an "interesting" way of handling tech. They tend to have superior or cutting edge tech that is somewhat niche, they had the firewire, which was quite a bit faster than USB at the time but failed to take off, they been using display port for years now even came up with the miniDP meanwhile DSUB is still king for compatibility (especially in business world with projectors and such). Now you got TB, which admittedly seems to be gaining some traction with a few of the higher end peripherals announced and Intel having it built into their chipsets. I do think it was an omission on Apple's part to still have USB2 instead of 3 in their machines.
Not really though, right now the iMac and MBP are the only ones to have TB ports. iMac is a very consumer oriented product, it will not have any high end peripherals plugged into it, its basically going to be iPods and digital cameras getting plugged into it, neither need any kind of speed. MBPs are somewhat different as they have both consumer users and "industry" users. The thing with the latter though is that they are the ones who are likely to buy the high end TB products.
Yeah pretty much, I had to back up all my stuff to external drives for the NAS project because the drives that go into NAS have to be formated to UFS and my writes were under 100mbps (10MB/s or so) my reads when I was transferring stuff back were somewhere around 200mbps (25MB/s or so). Nowhere near the limitation of USB2. eSATA and USB 3 start making sense when you get high end external RAID drives and they are already announcing those with TB.
More or less what thevictor390 said, limitation is generally in the storage not the bus. Not even the iPhone 3G on my old Windows machine took that long, it takes maybe a minute or two to do a backup on my IP4 and maybe 20-30 minutes for a full 16GB sync.
I see no reason NOT to put USB3 on a modern laptop simply because its available. However I don't think that it's something that you NEED. To use myself as an example it makes no difference to me if I have USB2 or 3 the only thing I plug in is my iPhone everything else is network based.
Using an external HDD through USB2.0 is slower than through eSATA, hence it should also be slower than through USB3.0 (can't test that). Somewhere in the order of three times faster for eSATA vs USB2.0 with my drive.
Maybe I didn't explain it right...
What drive are you using? I wonder if its down to SATA vs USB in so far as there being less overhead in SATA-to-SATA connections because even with new drives my speeds are nowhere near the limit of USB2. Wish I had some USB3 drives to test my work laptop's dock station has one.
