USB3 PC -> PC Transfer?

[kripz]

Possible? anyone tried it? Will i get anywhere near 5gbps with sata6 ssds?

[kripz]

Seems like it's pretty easy with linux. You just configure it like a network interface.

Now to try get my hands on a USB3 bridge cable.

[Stanza]

I think you might be misunderstanding some speeds

USB 2 is what 480 mega BITS second transfer rate.... Which they state as approx 60 mega BYTES second.... But most people will be lucky o see 30-40 megabytes per second in the real world.

So now we have USB 3 which they state as 5 giga BITS second transfer rate.... Which they state as 625 mega BYTES second .... Ie 10 times the speed of USB 2

So you will probably see real world 300-400 mega BYTES.

Now on to SATA
We have
SATA 1 = 1.5 giga BITS second
SATA 2 = 3.0 giga BITS second
SATA 3 = 6.0 giga BITS second <<< this I believe is what you are referring to

No SATA 6 exists as yet
Are you thinking you can transfer data from one system's ssd drive to another systems ssd drive via USB 3 at full speed?

Ie you are expecting to be able to transfer at say 300-400 mega bytes a second?

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[DrFrag]

Originally Posted by Stanza

We have
SATA 1 = 1.5 giga BITS second
SATA 2 = 3.0 giga BITS second
SATA 3 = 6.0 giga BITS second <<< this I believe is what you are referring to

No SATA 6 exists as yet

Technically we're not meant to call it SATA 3, it's meant to be referred to as SATA 6Gb/s.
(Frankly I think this is as dumb as Adobe asking people not to use Photoshop as a verb, so I intend to keep calling it SATA 3.)

I don't know if USB3 bridge cables exist. Plenty of USB2 varieties around and most seem marketed to connecting a PC to a Mac. I don't know much about Macs but as far as I can tell they don't ship with USB3 yet. Maybe when they do, USB3 bridge cables will pop up. Let us know if you find one.

As for speed, Stanza's figures look right. EverythingUSB estimate a real-world limit of 400MB/s on USB3.

[HobartTas]

Greetings

Once upon a time a long time ago, one used to connect Dos/Win 3.x boxes with null modem RS232 or printer cables and use Lantastic and later on pcAnyWhere but sadly Microsoft in their infinite wisdom have removed direct cable connections of ANY TYPE starting with Vista.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/930086/en-us

So unless you are either going to go back to XP (or run XP in a VM) you are not going to get anywhere unless presumably you probably write your own TCP/IP stack,networking,CIFS and whatever else is needed for it to run, like these people seem to have done with Vista.

http://www.usbgear.com/link/index.html

And as far as connecting it to say a Solaris ZFS NAS box is there even a USB3 driver in existence for any USB3 product in Solaris?

Originally Posted by Stanza

So you will probably see real world 300-400 mega BYTES..

That's fine by me, if USB3 bridge cables and software ever get released I would buy four of them and two USB3 four port cards and aggregate the links, according to your above stated figures that would then get me 1.2 - 1.6 GB's (or a good portion thereof) although the cards would have to be PCIe x4 or more likely at x8 to cope with the bandwidth.


Nice try though as there certainly is a demand for cheap, reliable and easy to use 10Gb's+ networking gear of any kind whatsoever (see Flain's infiniband or Stanza'a fiber channel threads for more info), sadly at the present time it doesn't exist.

Cheers

[kripz]

I'm using debian. Its possible to do using USB2.0 in ubuntu. I dont see any reason why it wouldnt be possible with USB3.0, but i guess ill find out.

I've ordered some USB3.0 A male headers to make my own cable as nobody seems to make a bridge cable. Since only 6 wires are used, ill use CAT5/6 cables.

Ie you are expecting to be able to transfer at say 300-400 mega bytes a second?

Anything above 1gbps will be good as the next step up is link aggregation/bonding/teaming or fibre.

2 $15-30 usb3 cards and a cable that will cost me about $10, seems pretty good to me.

Hopefully it works (most likely overlooked something ), will update when cable is made.

[Stanza]

If you are after speed

Cheapest option I can think of at the moment is 4gb fibre

Ie stalk eBay for a couple of 4gb fibre channel cards, grab a $10 LC to LC cable and you will be good for about 440mb/s transfers.

Keep an eye on my fibre channel thread, as I will be doing just this real soon. As I have now got my hands on the 4gb HBA's

You main trouble is going to be getting drives at either end to cope with the speed of the reads and he writes.

I think you will find with USB there is going to be a fair bit of overhead and some pretty funky latency issues for it to be viable... But hey give it a whirl and let us know

No harm in trying and learning something new along they way

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[t3h]

It will likely be easier and/or cheaper just to do link aggregation on multiple gigabit ethernet cards...

Also, wiring two USB 2 ports straight together won't work without appropriate bridge chips.

[Paronga]

Originally Posted by DrFrag

EverythingUSB estimate a real-world limit of 400MB/s on USB3.

that's pretty underwhelming. i never looked at it, but i always thought it was meant to be really fast.
I guess it isn't a competitor to thunderbolt

Originally Posted by HobartTas

That's fine by me, if USB3 bridge cables and software ever get released I would buy four of them and two USB3 four port cards and aggregate the links, according to your above stated figures that would then get me 1.2 - 1.6 GB's (or a good portion thereof) although the cards would have to be PCIe x4 or more likely at x8 to cope with the bandwidth.
Cheers

You might end up getting a lot of latency and CPU overhead with that setup.
also, the 4 USB plugs might all share the same Chip on the card, hence each chip might only get 400MB/s?

i dunno how it works? Probably a reason you don't use USB for networking though

[Stanza]

Might also be easier to grab a couple of FireWire 800 cards and a cable.

FireWire 800 can give you 400mb/s and is bidirectional... Whereas USB is Not

Snip
Comparison with USB

While USB*2.0 (introduced in 2001) is quoted as running at a higher signaling rate (480*Mbit/s) than legacy FireWire 400 (400 Mbit/s, available since 1995), data transfers over S400 FireWire interfaces generally outperform similar transfers over USB*2.0 interfaces in real world environments. Few if any USB*2.0 device implementations are capable of saturating the entire 480*Mbit/s, but this can be achieved with multiple devices on the same bus. In real world tests USB hosts rarely can sustain transfers exceeding 280*Mbit/s, with 240*Mbit/s being normal. This is likely due to USB's reliance on the host processor to manage low-level USB protocol, whereas FireWire delegates the same tasks to the interface hardware (requiring less or no CPU usage). For example, the FireWire host interface supports DMA and memory-mapped devices, allowing high-level protocols to run without loading the host CPU with interrupts and buffer-copy operations.[8] It should also be noted that FireWire features two data buses for each segment of the bus network whereas USB only features one. This means that FireWire can have communication in both directions at the same time, but with USB communication can only occur in one direction at any one time.
Other differences are that FireWire uses simpler bus networking, provides more power over the chain and more reliable data transfer, and is less taxing on a CPU.[50] USB requires the presence of a bus master, typically a PC, whereas FireWire is a true peer-to-peer network, thus allowing either device to serve as the host or client.

And

Networking over FireWire
FireWire can be used for ad-hoc (terminals only, no routers except where a FireWire hub is used) computer networks. Specifically, RFC 2734 specifies how to run IPv4 over the FireWire interface, and RFC 3146 specifies how to run IPv6.
Mac OS X, Linux, and FreeBSD include support for networking over FireWire.[53] Windows Me,[54] Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 include native support for IEEE 1394 networking.[55] Windows 2000 does not have native support but may work with third party drivers. A network can be set up between two computers using a single standard FireWire cable, or by multiple computers through use of a hub. This is similar to Ethernet networks with the major differences being transfer speed, conductor length, and the fact that standard FireWire cables can be used for point-to-point communication.
On December 4, 2004, Microsoft announced that it would discontinue support for IP networking over the FireWire interface in all future versions of Microsoft Windows.[56] Consequently, support for this feature is absent from Windows Vista and later Windows releases.[57][58] Microsoft rewrote their 1394 driver in Windows 7[59] but networking support for FireWire is not present. Unibrain offers free FireWire networking drivers for Windows called ubCore[60] which support Windows Vista and later versions.
The PlayStation 2 console had an i.LINK-branded 1394 connector. This was used for networking until the release of an Ethernet adapter late in the console's lifespan, but very few software titles supported the feature.
/snip


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[kripz]

Originally Posted by t3h

It will likely be easier and/or cheaper just to do link aggregation on multiple gigabit ethernet cards...

Need a capable switch, how much is a cheap one?

Originally Posted by t3h

Also, wiring two USB 2 ports straight together won't work without appropriate bridge chips.

I wasnt sure of this, some websites say you just need a crossover cable, which ill be making.

[DrFrag]

Originally Posted by HobartTas

Once upon a time a long time ago, one used to connect Dos/Win 3.x boxes with null modem RS232 or printer cables and use Lantastic and later on pcAnyWhere but sadly Microsoft in their infinite wisdom have removed direct cable connections of ANY TYPE starting with Vista.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/930086/en-us

Only serial, parallel and infrared have been dropped, you can still use USB. It's now called Windows Easy Transfer. You also need an "Easy Transfer Cable" (USB 2.0). I haven't tried this myself so I don't know how flexible it is. It might just be a system migration tool, and not so useful as a general purpose file copier.

Originally Posted by HobartTas

So unless you are either going to go back to XP (or run XP in a VM) you are not going to get anywhere unless presumably you probably write your own TCP/IP stack,networking,CIFS and whatever else is needed for it to run, like these people seem to have done with Vista.

None of those things are required for direct cable connection. It's just simple data transmission, there's no IP allocation or anything fancy going on. Laplink on DOS never used TCP/IP. My camera doesn't get an IP address when I hook it up to copy photos across.

Originally Posted by HobartTas

Nice try though as there certainly is a demand for cheap, reliable and easy to use 10Gb's+ networking gear of any kind whatsoever (see Flain's infiniband or Stanza'a fiber channel threads for more info), sadly at the present time it doesn't exist.

I agree. The entry cost is what's stopping me from switching to 10Gb networking.

However, direct connections will never fill this gap. You have to do some ugly hacks to run USB long enough to get to another room. Even if your software can manage hubs and port aggregation, the distance and overheads will wreck your speed. Ultimately, in tweaking the cable quality and packets and transmission layers, you end up with something that looks more and more like standard networking.

Excellent post by the way. Really got me looking into things.

Originally Posted by kripz

I wasnt sure of this, some websites say you just need a crossover cable, which ill be making.

That would probably fry one or both computers. Unlike CAT5, you can't hook USB hubs together with arbitrary ports - there's an "upstream" port and multiple "downstream" ports. USB also carries voltage. You need a chip in the middle to handle this.

[DrFrag]

Missed a question...

Originally Posted by kripz

Need a capable switch, how much is a cheap one?

Look for IEEE 802.3ad in the switch specifications. This means it can do port aggregation.

Here's a bunch of models that list it.

[kripz]

Originally Posted by DrFrag

That would probably fry one or both computers. Unlike CAT5, you can't hook USB hubs together with arbitrary ports - there's an "upstream" port and multiple "downstream" ports. USB also carries voltage. You need a chip in the middle to handle this.

image

Yep, just did some more research, looks like i've hit a dead end.

[Stanza]

Originally Posted by kripz

Yep, just did some more research, looks like i've hit a dead end.

What are you actually trying to achieve? Just a connection faster than gigabit networking?

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