7D2, 6D2, 5D4... USB3?

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Aug 22, 2013
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Hi all,
As many I am sure a common way to grab files from your camera is plugging the USB cable into your computer. Of course, this is much slower than using the SD card directly due to the slow speed of USB2.

BUT, there is now MicroUSB 3.0 which is extremely fast. Anyone hear anything about this being a feature for future canon pro bodies? Thx :)
 
Ruined said:
Hi all,
As many I am sure a common way to grab files from your camera is plugging the USB cable into your computer. Of course, this is much slower than using the SD card directly due to the slow speed of USB2.

BUT, there is now MicroUSB 3.0 which is extremely fast. Anyone hear anything about this being a feature for future canon pro bodies? Thx :)
Not for me, I never download 64 GB of files from my camera. Use a card reader!
 
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On my old S3IS I just plugged the camera in and downloaded. The downside was that Canon apparently doesn't like just any old program looking at files on that camera, I had to use their software, so you have the potential that some bureaucrat will decide to limit when/how you access your files.

If properly implemented it would be preferable to use USB3 over a card reader, and I wouldn't worry about future compatibility, it will be quite a while before any flash cards (at least sub $1,000 ones) saturate the 400MB/s bandwidth afforded by USB3.
Not that the peak bandwidth of USB3 matters much since the your HDD will still only write between 100-200MB/s. Unless you run multiple drives in RAID or plan on buying a lot of flash storage you're not going to be able to saturate USB3.

The bottom line is that USB2 at 10-20MB/s is terrible, and should generally be avoided if you care about data transfer time.
 
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9VIII said:
On my old S3IS I just plugged the camera in and downloaded. The downside was that Canon apparently doesn't like just any old program looking at files on that camera, I had to use their software, so you have the potential that some bureaucrat will decide to limit when/how you access your files.

If properly implemented it would be preferable to use USB3 over a card reader, and I wouldn't worry about future compatibility, it will be quite a while before any flash cards (at least sub $1,000 ones) saturate the 400MB/s bandwidth afforded by USB3.
Not that the peak bandwidth of USB3 matters much since the your HDD will still only write between 100-200MB/s. Unless you run multiple drives in RAID or plan on buying a lot of flash storage you're not going to be able to saturate USB3.

The bottom line is that USB2 at 10-20MB/s is terrible, and should generally be avoided if you care about data transfer time.

my hdd is faster than 100-200mb/sec and by a lot...around 500 mb/sec attached on a sata3 controller, but i guess it would take a quite big performance hit if attached to a usb 3.0 enclosure

and yes, to have an usb 3 would be preferable than an usb 2, but you would need a good hardware to exploit the full potential offered by the protocol
 
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9VIII said:
The bottom line is that USB2 at 10-20MB/s is terrible, and should generally be avoided if you care about data transfer time.

USB2 performance should not be that slow unless your card reader is junk (or, if the reader is your camera, unless the manufacturer doesn't know how to implement USB device mode worth a darn).

The peak theoretical speed for USB2 is about 60 MB (480 megabits) per second. In practice, at least with hard drives, you usually start to run up against CPU overhead, IRQ sharing, and other performance bottlenecks before you actually approach that theoretical limit—somewhere in the mid-300 megabit range, IIRC. That said, if you're really getting only 10 MB (80 megabits) per second, there's something seriously wrong....

Are you sure you're not thinking about USB 1.1's 10 megabit limit?
 
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dgatwood said:
9VIII said:
The bottom line is that USB2 at 10-20MB/s is terrible, and should generally be avoided if you care about data transfer time.

USB2 performance should not be that slow unless your card reader is junk (or, if the reader is your camera, unless the manufacturer doesn't know how to implement USB device mode worth a darn).

The peak theoretical speed for USB2 is about 60 MB (480 megabits) per second. In practice, at least with hard drives, you usually start to run up against CPU overhead, IRQ sharing, and other performance bottlenecks before you actually approach that theoretical limit—somewhere in the mid-300 megabit range, IIRC. That said, if you're really getting only 10 MB (80 megabits) per second, there's something seriously wrong....

Are you sure you're not thinking about USB 1.1's 10 megabit limit?

I'm pretty sure I was thinking of flash drive write speeds (http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/usb-thumb-drive-charts/Copy-Benchmark-Images-Write,2301.html), which is probably more due to slow flash memory than the interface.
You're right about read speed though, which is more what we're concerned with here, the good ones get about 35MB/s read speed. 35MB/s isn't incredible but it is a lot better. A quick look through Google shows roughly the same thing for USB2 card readers.
 
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