Thursday, January 14, 2010

USB 3 and Gigabit ethernet: two articles on the gap between marketing and reality

Vendors lie. It's the nature of things.

Ski resorts lie about their snow coverage, and tech vendors lie about performance. Marketing, for example, convinced most geeks that USB 2 was as fast as Firewire, but that's certainly not true under OS X.

In the same vein, here are two articles that contrast real world performance with marketing claims:
Coding Horror Gigabit Ethernet and Back of the Envelope Calculations: A 2005 article that showed Gigabit ethernet is about 3 times faster than 100 mbps ethernet -- not 10 times as fast. Great discussion.
Dans Data review: USB 3 drive box and controller card kit (Jan 2010): In most available machines USB 3 is 3 times faster than USB 2. (So it's probably faster than Firewire 400 and maybe comparable to Firewire 800).
Threefold improvements are nothing to sneeze at, especially in the post-Moore's Law era. It's just not quite what marketing promises.

Mac users need not feel USB 3 envy -- we get Firewire 800.

1 comment:

  1. This is incorrect for Gigabit speed, i have achieved 125MB/s with ASRock X58 Extreme w/ Integrated Realtek Gigabit LAN, Offloads TCP/UDP IPv4/IPv6 4k packets to a ASUS G73Jh with a Atheros PCI-E gigbit LAN, both Intel I-7, 920 and 740QM respectivly, 24GB and 6 GB RAM, both with 4 GB Ram drives and a Netgear wndr3700/av with 350MHz rj45 ethernet cable. using standard ethernet cable will get on average 200-350Mbps. so reallity is UPGRADE YOUR WIRES!!

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