CES 2010 - USB 3, ITV/Media Streamers and Lots of eReaders
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 6, 2010 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
CES isn't like the tech tradeshows of the past decade. Shows like Comdex, Computex and IDF generally start on the first day of the show. CES instead offers a couple of days of press events before the actual show itself.
Today we had the first press conference of CES - ASUS, followed by a pre-show called CES Unveiled. A bunch of companies cram into a ballroom with science-fair style tables and booths to show a preview of what's to come at CES.
Seagate was the first on my stop around CES Unveiled. USB 3.0 is a hot topic simply because we finally have storage, both mechanical and solid state, that is severely limited by USB 2.0.
It's called the BlackArmor PS110 USB 3.0 portable external hard drive performance kit. Yep, a mouthful. With it you get an external 500GB 2.5" hard drive. But since no existing notebooks have USB 3.0 support you also get a USB 3.0 ExpressCard.
You would get higher performance if you had native USB 3.0 on your machine, since you're bound by ExpressCard's 2.5Gbps bandwidth limit. Even so Seagate promises as much as 3x the performance you'd get over USB 2.0.
The kit costs $179.99.
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mckirkus - Wednesday, January 6, 2010 - link
You don't need USB 3 to stream HD over a network. 15MB/second will easily saturate a 10/100 network and I don't know of very many blu-ray disks that top out at much more than 3MB/s. (that's megabytes)Of course if you backing up large files over a gigabit network to a USB hard drive then yeah, it makes sense.
jmurbank - Wednesday, January 6, 2010 - link
HD can easily handle on a 100 Mb network. HD bitrate is around 25 to 50 megabits per second. It is far from what you think. This is why the Sandstorm HD Homerun ATSC tuners can work. Sure it will help to have 1 Gb NIC, but that will be over kill. HD will over load a wireless network connection even 802.11n because wireless networks has a lot of over head.If I were backing up data, I would use IDE or SATA and screw USB.
rlthomas - Wednesday, January 6, 2010 - link
Do you mean 100Mb network can handle HD? Why screw USB, it's just another option? Do you mean eSATA? Portable HDD are handy.Lysh - Wednesday, January 6, 2010 - link
Well assuming it houses a 9.5mm drive, currently the highest capacity is 640GB.But 12.5mm, 1TB is the max then.