I would love to use a USB 3 drive, but the ports for it are located on the back of my PC that’s under the desk… very inconvenient.
“That’s ok, self!” I said to myself, “I’ll just get a USB 3.0 hub!” Utter disappointment. I have YET to find one that works with a reliable set of the 3.0 stick-drives that are out there.
Have you come across this? It seems like the makers of these hubs don’t even TRY to test that they work with any range of USB 3.0 drives.
I am still stuck with my USB 2.0 port laptops. No 3.0 since they are old. I guess its time to switch my stack. I have to still figure out some good backup storage for my media.
Jeff, I thought that USB flash drive is out dated !!
With cloud storage: drop-box, box-net, … etc, and services like Google+ instance upload of your photos/videos, I think no need for a USB flash drive anymore.
Jeff, I hope you share your experience in cloud storage.
It’s rather funny, I actually got an SSD because I have a USB 3.0 external drive. It occurred to me that my USB drive was faster than my desktop’s HDD and I began to feel just how out of date I had gotten.
Drop Box, Box, Google Drive etc etc etc are all well and good for transferring/syncing files between your own machines. But if you have huge files (slow to download/upload over the Internet) or have a need to transfer files to a machine that does not have Internet access, then you will need some kind of physical storage.
It’s all very well to talk about USB 3 being blazing fast, but on my machine (Dell XPS ultrabook) it’s completely unreliable. I would type more but I’m trying to get it finished before I get the da-dum, dum-da, da-dum symphony followed by a blue screen, a reboot and a ‘that port no longer exists’ refusal by the computer to acknowledge the blue slot in the side.
Seriously, the USB driver support is patchy, buggy, rubbish, slow, unstable - insert your ‘beta product’ terminology in here. Just try searching for ‘USB 3’ and see if the top results are talking about how good it is, or how unstable it makes machines.
Steve Jobs’ dream of the NeXT Step could easily be a reality with these things. Dumb boxes plugged into walls. Plug in your USB to use your software programs with your data. Just unplug and reset to make it ready for the next user.
I’m with you on the surprise factor, as recently as a couple weeks ago my only USB 3.0 device was an external 1 TB mechanical drive that was faster than my other flash drives but still very slow. I was trying to install Windows 10 on my Mac through bootcamp and it took nearly half an hour just to create the drive on an old USB so I decided enough was enough. I am now the proud owner of a Sandisk Extreme CZ80 drive. 64gb with 245 reads and 190 writes for $38. I’ll never buy another USB 2.0 device again.
Too bad most people’s experience with USB 3 is going to be the bottom-barrel stuff that goes on sale all the time. Adata, Kingston, Silicon Power, drives so slow that SanDisk USB 2 drives are faster and more reliable. Well, reads are generally pretty fast, but writes are too slow.
Also, USB 3 hubs are pretty unreliable. Somebody needs to set up a comparative review of those things, so the rest of us can know what to buy.