4 ms·

An average person doesn't need mods than USB 2.0 speeds. Anything past microSD speeds is fine. Even M.2 can only do 2GB/s or so, right? 120Gbps is way beyond

An average person doesn't need mods than USB 2.0 speeds. Anything past microSD speeds is fine. Even M.2 can only do 2GB/s or so, right? 120Gbps is way beyond anything an average person needs. The only issue is that hopefully it will replace HDMI and some cables might not handle that. But even then, it's solved by buying a few Ankers and marking them with tape. Yeah, it's all super confusing, and could be better, but in practice it works really well.

Dalewyn 4y ago
>Even M.2 can only do 2GB/s or so, right? M.2 can do anywhere from 0.5GB/s to 14GB/s depending on the protocol used.
throwaway09223 4y ago
No, it really doesn't work well. Have you ever used a USB protocol analyzer or written a USB device driver? Bad cables operating out of spec don't just make things a bit slower - they introduce noise. They corrupt data which best case is caught by a checksum and just creates latency but worst case triggers device driver bugs and makes devices behave oddly, hang, need to be plugged and unplugged, etc. This is enormously frustrating for users and it happens all the time. Users typically blame their devices, or their computers, rather than the bad cabling. Furthermore, it's not even remotely correct that an average person doesn't need more than USB2.0 speeds. That's only 480Mbit/s, which isn't nearly enough to drive the $80 HD webcams that we're all using while WFH. Common modern webcams need like 1.5Gbit/s, and that's just the webcam. You can't run a typical WFH computer on USB 2.0 in the age of zoom meetings. USB is an absolute nightmare right now.
- eternityforest 4y ago
  I don't think average consumers use $80 webcams. If you're not a 45k+ a year type, you might very well be doing remote work on phones, assuming you're WFH at all. Almost all laptops have built-in cameras and the convenience factor is pretty high. Even if you are, webcams could very well run in 480Mbps if they had to, if in camera encoding was still the norm, which it would be if high speed cables weren't (theoretically) widespread. I agree that the situation might not be ideal for people doing stuff beyond average consumer level, but even that could be mostly worked around with a controller firmware update(Count the bit error rate, inform the user if they are using a trash cable). No amount of standardization and marking of the cables will eliminate scammers without killing cheap uncertified stuff totally, so I would think software and documentation fixes would be best. Most stuff already comes with a suitable USB cable. Just pop up a reminder to fish out the good one if the one you're using is bad.
  - throwaway09223 4y ago
    "Almost all laptops have built-in cameras and the convenience factor is pretty high." How do you think the internal camera on most laptops is connected to the rest of the computer? (Hint: It's permanently wired to the USB bus. It's a non-removable USB webcam) Given this fact, it seems you should actually agree with my original statement.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - adrian_b 4y ago
      That is correct for most older laptops. However, many newer laptops have begun to use cameras with a MIPI interface, like the smartphones. This has created problems with bad device driver support for non-Windows operating systems, as discussed in a recent HN thread.
      - voxadam 4y ago
        > This has created problems with bad device driver support for non-Windows operating systems, as discussed in a recent HN thread. That story for the interested was "The growing image-processor unpleasantness" and can be found here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32516826 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32516826
NavinF 4y ago
>Even M.2 can only do 2GB/s or so, right? 2012 called and they want their PCIe 2.0 devices back. My PCIe 4.0 x4 SSD does 7GB/s for bursts up to ~700GB at a time (SLC cache) which is very convenient when I'm moving video around. You can also get x8 and x16 data center SSDs. PCIe 5.0 SSDs should come out next month and double that.
Shorel 4y ago
The average person now has a laptop without an HDMI port, without a dedicated GPU, without Ethernet. It only has one or two USB-C ports. A USB cable replaces the HDMI connection. That by itself requires more than USB 2.0 speeds. HDMI is 3.2 GB/s vs USB2 480 MB/s. Now add connecting an external GPU, Gigabit Ethernet, they require faster speeds. eGPUs in particular, use a lot of bandwidth.

Dalewyn 4y ago

>Even M.2 can only do 2GB/s or so, right? M.2 can do anywhere from 0.5GB/s to 14GB/s depending on the protocol used.

throwaway09223 4y ago

No, it really doesn't work well. Have you ever used a USB protocol analyzer or written a USB device driver? Bad cables operating out of spec don't just make things a bit slower - they introduce noise. They corrupt data which best case is caught by a checksum and just creates latency but worst case triggers device driver bugs and makes devices behave oddly, hang, need to be plugged and unplugged, etc. This is enormously frustrating for users and it happens all the time. Users typically blame their devices, or their computers, rather than the bad cabling. Furthermore, it's not even remotely correct that an average person doesn't need more than USB2.0 speeds. That's only 480Mbit/s, which isn't nearly enough to drive the $80 HD webcams that we're all using while WFH. Common modern webcams need like 1.5Gbit/s, and that's just the webcam. You can't run a typical WFH computer on USB 2.0 in the age of zoom meetings. USB is an absolute nightmare right now.

eternityforest 4y ago
I don't think average consumers use $80 webcams. If you're not a 45k+ a year type, you might very well be doing remote work on phones, assuming you're WFH at all. Almost all laptops have built-in cameras and the convenience factor is pretty high. Even if you are, webcams could very well run in 480Mbps if they had to, if in camera encoding was still the norm, which it would be if high speed cables weren't (theoretically) widespread. I agree that the situation might not be ideal for people doing stuff beyond average consumer level, but even that could be mostly worked around with a controller firmware update(Count the bit error rate, inform the user if they are using a trash cable). No amount of standardization and marking of the cables will eliminate scammers without killing cheap uncertified stuff totally, so I would think software and documentation fixes would be best. Most stuff already comes with a suitable USB cable. Just pop up a reminder to fish out the good one if the one you're using is bad.
- throwaway09223 4y ago
  "Almost all laptops have built-in cameras and the convenience factor is pretty high." How do you think the internal camera on most laptops is connected to the rest of the computer? (Hint: It's permanently wired to the USB bus. It's a non-removable USB webcam) Given this fact, it seems you should actually agree with my original statement.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - adrian_b 4y ago
    That is correct for most older laptops. However, many newer laptops have begun to use cameras with a MIPI interface, like the smartphones. This has created problems with bad device driver support for non-Windows operating systems, as discussed in a recent HN thread.
    - voxadam 4y ago
      > This has created problems with bad device driver support for non-Windows operating systems, as discussed in a recent HN thread. That story for the interested was "The growing image-processor unpleasantness" and can be found here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32516826 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32516826

NavinF 4y ago

>Even M.2 can only do 2GB/s or so, right? 2012 called and they want their PCIe 2.0 devices back. My PCIe 4.0 x4 SSD does 7GB/s for bursts up to ~700GB at a time (SLC cache) which is very convenient when I'm moving video around. You can also get x8 and x16 data center SSDs. PCIe 5.0 SSDs should come out next month and double that.

Shorel 4y ago

The average person now has a laptop without an HDMI port, without a dedicated GPU, without Ethernet. It only has one or two USB-C ports. A USB cable replaces the HDMI connection. That by itself requires more than USB 2.0 speeds. HDMI is 3.2 GB/s vs USB2 480 MB/s. Now add connecting an external GPU, Gigabit Ethernet, they require faster speeds. eGPUs in particular, use a lot of bandwidth.