Whats with the USB Trend?

[I_W]

The new USB standard (2.0?) is supposed to be backward compatible with 1.X. And it's faster than Firewire as I recall.

I'm waiting for the price of the PCI combo USB/Firewire cards with editing software to get down to around $30 and then I'll bite. Otherwise to get to USB 2.0 it almost pays to look at a new motherboard with USB 2.0 cards in the $30-$40 and up range and the combo cards which also have firewire near to $100.

I see no reason to even consider an otherwise fast peripheral like HD or CD drive connected to the old 1.X USB. With the new standard you're getting to the point where it becomes possible to operate peripherals and be fast enough to make it worthwhile.

Of course, with my luck, I'll finally give in and upgrade to the new standards and add Firewire about 31 days before a dramatic price drop. I always seem to do that with upgrades.

[otheos]

rant
USB is the proof of Intel's domination. They have managed to establish an inferior technology when a 33x faster one was already there.

Firewire (IEEE1394) was already in use when intel started pushing USB, and while the latter offers less speed, Intel managed to put the whole market on hold for a competing standard (USB2.0) and establish USB1.0/1.1 in the mean time.

So we were fed poor technology once more in the name of Intel's profitability, but I guess when nobody cares, that's what is happening.
/rant

[AuraEdge]

Intel is a big part of the reason that USB is so big now. If they had not integrated USB into there chipsets back with those old pentium chipsets, they would not have appeard on the boards. As I said before, a big part of the popularity of USB is because USB has been on alot of old boards, so even your neighbors old obsoleting computer has two USB ports. If say, they had integrated firewire instead, i have no doubt that firewire would be the big trend now. I could be wrong about this part, but I would think that USB was a lot cheaper to integrate than Firewire. That leads to cheaper manufacturing costs, and cheaper end-user costs.

I have only owned one USB printer and one LPT printer.
The USB one is much faster, but is almost 3 years younger than the LPT one, which was probably built on old technology, so I have a bad comparison base for speed among the two printer standards.

And COM ports...I remmeber setting those up.
Even LPT ports were a pain. At work, we had some POS (Point-of-sale, not the other POS) machines we set up at a hockey rink. They needed to be hooked up to a reciept printer, and a ticket printer, but we hard Com and LPT problems out the wazoo witht he addon card...we had to set and try a bunch of different settings with the jumpers on the controller card to get it to work.
Man, if they had specialized USB printers back then, we wouldnt have wasted that hour or two.

Also, I did not mean USB monitors. I meant monitors with integrated USB hubs..I have one right here in front of me as a matter of fact. It has two input connections, a VGA connection for the video, and a USB connection, which has no purpose but to let the computer communicate with the 2 port USB hub on board. The ports located on the monitor are much easier to access than the ones on the back of the computer.
I also have a USB hub in my keyboard, which my mouse plugs into..one less wire going to the computer. Also when my friend needs to upload pics from her digital camera, it can plug right into the side of my keyboard, instead of reaching back into the depths of the back of the computer to plug it in.

Most new boards support 6+ USB ports ports out of the box, usually giving headers for 4 out of the box (2 on board, 2 through a backplate)

[Herb]

I can't complain about USB, I've a 15"TFT which runs with USB (recently discussed here) but reconnected it to the VGA port since performance was disturbing other devices.

Now I run with a 7 port USB-Hub:
- Kodak-Digicam
- USB mouse (removed, like my PS2 Marble FX better)
- Creative MP3 Jukebox
- FM-Radio
- MS80 digital sound system
- Philips CDRW (also firewire cabable)
- latest toy, Labtec digital stereo headset for VoIP

The weirdest thing I learned recently, I listen to my favourite stuff on the headset, while I play other stuff to the DSS from radio or other files for the spouse and record in parallel from line-in over sound card old vinyls. 3 different sound sources parallel active with a 400Mhz PII

Ok, next box on plan will have 3 firewire ports for heavy duty stuff like Camcorder, Burner (as a.m.), ext. HDD

[Speed]

Well I have 4 usb ports on my monitor, 2 on my keyboard, 2 on my computer, I also have firewire, but the only thing that I use the firewire for is digital editing from my camcorder. USB is great, like everyone has said: "It beats fidling with the back of your computer everytime you want to add something" I also have one firewire and two USB ports available INSIDE the box!! Havent used those yet tho...


Speed

[daveleau]

I kind of went away form USB items when I began to have bandwith problems with USB. USB (1.0) has a very low bandwith ceiling that causes items to malfunction. For instance, if I want to run a web-cam, I basically have to have it on its own USB root hub or else it will malfunction if there are too many devices (so much for the dozens of peripherals connected at one time). Then with USB 2.0, the bandwith went up significantly. This allows for a wider use of USB products and something more akin to what USB 1.0 was supposed to be like.

Dave

[amdkt7]

I love it, though sometimes it can be flakey.

I just got some usb flashcard read/writers. I have one at work and on at home. I have a few 48 meg flashcards (rescued from the trash). When I need to take something home from work I just pop in a flash card and copy it to it. Then I just take home a tiny card. I use to have to either borrow a harddrive or make lots of floppys.

I bought the first one from Staples for $19.98, then bought an other one for $15 this weekend. It came in handy this weekend, I was setting up a computer, I could download drivers from my main machine, then just carry it over to the other computer and plug it in.

It's pretty fast. A few megs is transfered pretty quick, however a 40 meg file took about a minute.

My total cost $25.
A flash card costs about $30 I think. I saved about 15 of these 48meg flashcards from a gaylord going to reclaim. I rescue all kinds of things, harddrives, cables, even a whole computer.

Today I got a little unit that I can use as a project box.

Gee did I ever get off topic!

I have a usb $50 camera, an HP printer, a racing game wheel, and my flashcard reader.

I'd like the 2.0 USB also, it would be neat to have a usb 2.0 harddrive for doing backups to be stored in a safe place.

[EndobioticChaos]

I really like USB. Some of the things I like best about it are things already mentioned, such as hot-swap capabilities and the fact that so many different types of peripherals use it. I've got six USB ports, and use five of 'em: webcam; USB zip drive; joystick; 2x gamepads.

[Solid Snake]

USB is great when it comes to controllers. How else could you have 4 player sports games? The gameport only supports 4 axes and 4 buttons. USB is limitless. USB soundcards and speakers are a waste. Sound devices belong on the PCI bus, where bandwidth is cheap. USB is also great for situations where you need multiple keyboards and mice. I have a newer $30 USB scanner than outperforms my 5 year old SCSI in speed and quality. USB allows almost limitless connectivity. Now you can attach things to the USB port that would otherwise occupy a PCI slot such as NICs, Tuners, SCSI cards for scanners, wireless networking etc.

[brandon184]

Can't say I've used firewire - but my recent PC upgrade familiarized me with the wonderful world of USB 2.0.

You'll notice the speed vary (USB 2.0 claimed top speed is about 60MB/s (480mbps)..) when it comes to using different devices. I guess it depends on the overall compatibility of the product with the latest version.

- Brandon
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