The untimely death of USB 3.2
We were excited about the display and transfer potential of this new USB specification, but apparently, we’re the only ones.
The external hard drive market isn’t the fastest developing area of tech, so when something like a new USB specification comes along it can entirely change the landscape. The USB 3.2 spec was announced back in February 2019, but we didn’t see any devices with it until WD’s Black P50 Game Drive which launched locally in February 2020. At the time we couldn’t actually track down any PCs with a USB 3.2 port, so the max speed we could get this backwards compatible SSD to was 950MB/s. Fast forward to today and … there’s still not one laptop on the market that has a USB 3.2 connection.
The USB 3.2 specification hasn’t been announced as dead however, it’s just kind of been forgotten. A fate that’s perhaps worse when you consider we were really excited about it rolling out.
There are a couple of things that stop today’s external hard drives from reaching the 2,000MB/s plus read and write speeds you get from internal SSDs, but the main bottleneck is the type of connection. External SSDs generally use a SATA 3 (6Gbps) connection to communicate with your computer, which means you aren’t able to get much above 500MB/s read and write speeds. Samsung took a swing at improving this by using the much faster Thunderbolt (40Gbps) connection in its X5 Portable SSD, however the proprietary controllers were pricey so the drive will price most consumers out. Compounding this issues is the fact that Thunderbolt is not used by all the latest PCs, so while it’ll work for transferring files from one device, there’s a good chance the other one won’t be compatible and there’s no cross compatibility with USB, so if there’s no Thunderbolt, you won’t be getting your files. Finally, after about 15 seconds the drive heated up to a point that it needed to throttle itself to be slower than 550MB/s, so in short, Thunderbolt is not a great speedy storage solution.
USB 3.2 could, in theory, fix these problems – or at least the vast majority of them – if it was ever actually picked up. The third generation of USB 3 connection adds an additional lane of USB 3.1 (Gen 2) bandwidth to double the throughput from 10Gbps to 20Gbps. This isn’t as fast as the 40Gbps you get from Thunderbolt, but USB 3.2 is purportedly cheaper to implement and is fully backwards compatible. This means that a drive like the WD Black P50 can get up to 1000MB/s read and write speeds if you use it with an older USB 3.1 port, and it’ll even talk to USB 3 and 2 inputs if it has to.
And we haven’t even gotten into the fact that USB 3.2 would be able to supersede the throughput speed of DisplayPort 1.2 specification (17.28Gbps) which would mean you could run your high resolution gaming monitors over sleek new universal cables.
At the moment we don’t have any answers for you so we’ll just have to leave the question of: What happened to USB 3.2? to be answered in a later installment of Random Access.
“The USB 3.2 specification hasn’t been announced as dead however, it’s just kind of been forgotten. A fate that’s perhaps worse when you consider we were really excited about it rolling out.”