How to determine which USB port is on a laptop or computer? usb 3 0 on my computer

USB drives, or, to put it simply, flash drives, have firmly entered our lives, and it is difficult to imagine a person who does not use this device. However, the choice of a USB drive for many is determined only by design and volume, some who have already encountered the problem of slow recording also look at speed. We propose to understand the differences between flash drives in terms of parameters that are less often paid attention to, but which are the main ones for USB drives.

The very first USB drives designed to transfer and store digital information appeared in 2000. Due to their compactness compared to other media, today they have practically replaced CDs and other less technologically advanced storage media. Now such a device is perceived as a standard thing: many wear them as key rings or give them as a useful souvenir, for example, for the New Year.

The devices in question are produced by many well-known and not so famous manufacturers (Adata, Kingston, Apacer, Silicon Power, Corsair, Transcend, TeamGroup, Sandisk, Lexar), so a well-known manufacturer is often a guarantee of quality for the user and allows you to concentrate on design when choosing. There are many fakes from China on the market (especially in online stores), which, while claiming some characteristics, in reality do not correspond to them.

All this leaves its mark on the choice of the consumer. The development of online storage makes it possible in many situations to do without the use of flash drives and have access to data anywhere, but they are not always able to replace a physical storage medium.

The volume of a USB disk is a key indicator for the price (Yandex.Market data):

4 GB - 180 rubles

8 GB -190 rubles

16 GB - 270 rubles

32 GB - 500 rubles

64 GB - 1000 rubles

128 GB - 2900 rubles

256 GB - 11000 rubles

In the listed information, only the volume and the average price were taken into account. Many manufacturers do not list the read and write speed for the media.

For SD- (micro-SD) cards, the packaging often indicates the class of the device, which determines only the write speed:

Class 2 - (write speed not less than 2 MB/s)

Сlass 4 - (write speed not less than 4 MB/s)

Сlass 6 - (write speed not less than 6 MB/s)

Сlass 10 - (write speed not less than 10 MB/s)

For a USB drive, an important parameter is the USB standard (2.0 or 3.0), which determines the potential capabilities of the device. USB stands for "Universal Serial Bus". USB 3.0 (SuperSpeed USB) has the potential for very high speed and performance.

USB 2.0 in theory should have a speed of 480 Mbps, but in reality it does not reach even 250 Mbps. USB 3.0 can reach a theoretical maximum speed of 4.8Gbps, ten times the speed of USB 2.0.

A 16 GB USB 2.0 flash drive costs about 270 rubles, a USB 3.0 of the same size costs 370 rubles.

The USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 standards are largely compatible with each other. This means that by inserting a USB 3.0 flash drive into a 2.0 slot (a USB 2.0 flash drive into a 3.0 slot), it is quite possible to read and write data, however, the speed will be limited either by the slot or by the drive.

Visually, drives and connectors of the 3.0 standard are distinguished by the presence of blue plastic inside.

How can you independently check the reality of the volume declared on the package and the speed characteristics of a USB drive? Free programs will allow you to do this, the work with which is quite simple.

The first h2testw program (link) will allow you to estimate the actual volume, this is especially important if you purchase media in Chinese online stores, where the seller often tries to deceive the buyer.

This program does not require installation. We run it and see the following:

By default, the program language is German, so if you are not strong in this language, you should set the switch to English at the top:

We leave all the other switches in their places, press the "Vrite + Verify" button to start the test, we see the following picture:

Testing takes a long time, the program writes information in blocks and reads it after writing. An 8 GB USB drive will be tested for about 40 minutes. As a result, we will see the following report:

And this is what the result looks like for a fake drive, where the manufacturer stated the volume is 64 GB, but in fact we have 7.4 GB:

Of course, in this case, it is advisable to demonstrate the test results to the seller and return your money.

This program leaves files on the tested disk that must be deleted manually:

The second CrystalDiskMark program will allow you to evaluate the speed characteristics of the drive.

Universal Serial Bus is a serial universal bus. It was developed as an alternative to the parallel and serial communication protocols. In January 1996, the 1.0 standard came into effect. A lot of time passed before the release of the USB 2.0 standard.

What is the usb speed

In general, four different types of data rates are assumed for the universal bus. They are not to be confused with versions of USB itself. Improved data transfer rates have been introduced with each subsequent version of the USB standard, of course, with support for all previous ones. It must be taken into account that Universal Serial Bus version 2.0 devices do not always provide data transfer at High-Speed speeds. Full-Speed is a level where the maximum speed remains only for some devices. The next version of the USB standard is 3.0. It supports not only SuperSpeed, but also the previous three types of speeds. It also refers to version 2.0 rather than replacing it. High-Speed cannot be defined as a version of the 3.0 standard because devices such as Full-Speed, Low-Speed, and High-Speed are USB 2.0 but not USB 3.0.

How to determine which usb

USB-IF (USB Implementers Forum) has developed a special logo for each type of speed. With it, you can determine the correspondence between the device and the standard.

Windows Device Manager is a Device Manager. It will help us to know if a device of a certain speed supports any particular USB device. In general, it is considered that this is not the most suitable solution to the problem. We will need to try different USB root hubs to find the correct device. But how do you know which usb?

First, open the "Device Manager". To do this, hover the mouse over the "My Computer" menu. Right-click on the line "Properties" - "Hardware" and "Device Manager". Next, we need to expand the Universal Serial Bus Controllers node and open the USB root hub properties window. To make it convenient for us to work, let's start from the lowest. The next step is to go to the tab "Power" or Power.

If our device is connected to this hub, then we will be able to notice that it will appear in the "Connected devices" or Attached Devices section. Also note that the root USB has exactly six ports. One of them is used by the device.

To find out the speed of the Universal Serial Bus, we need to open the Advanced or Advanced tab. Root hubs can run at multiple speeds at the same time.

And several other devices that we will connect to it, simultaneously measuring the speed of their work.

Let's check what is the real read and write speed for the new interface, at the same time we will test the purchased controller in "combat" conditions :)

First, let's test my new 8 GB USB 3.0 flash drive. Here he is:

As you can see, “super speed” is written on the packaging and below are the specific values \u200b\u200bof this “super speed”: read 100 MB / s (read - 100 megabytes per second) and write 20 MB / s (write - 20 megabytes per second). In the course of testing, we will definitely check this statement!

Also, another USB drive will take part in our test: an external hard drive with a USB 3.0 interface from Seagate.

But let's get it right! First, let's unpack our flash drive and put it next to its "sister" (also 8 gigabytes) USB 2.0 standard Here's what we got:

As we can see, the USB 3.0 flash drive is noticeably larger. What caused it?

Let's look at this point in more detail. What does a typical disassembled old usb drive look like? And it looks like this:

Here we have: a printed circuit board with one microcircuit (flash memory chip) and a small controller that controls the entire "household" + the connector itself. There is practically nothing of interest in the case anymore.

Now, let's look at a flash drive of the same size (8 gigabytes), but of a new (high-speed) standard:

We see that the board has as many as four flash memory chips (in the photo they are marked in red) plus a controller chip that controls them. Four chips need more space, hence the larger size of the whole structure.

It would not be superfluous to note here that high-speed flash drives of 16 gigabytes are even larger in size! I think now you, dear readers, understand why?

Such a "fast" flash drive works as a zero-level raid array (Raid 0), when several are combined into one virtual cluster, where information is distributed immediately across all disks included in the array in the form of small blocks (stripes). Due to this, an increased speed of the entire cluster is achieved. The speed increases in proportion to the number of disks involved in such aggregation.

Note: in the design described above, speed is achieved by sacrificing reliability. Since, if at least one of the disks fails, the entire array is destroyed. I repeat, it is not designed for data storage redundancy (reliability), but specifically for the speed of their processing.

Now we can clearly see that the increased speed of the new usb 3 flash drives is achieved largely due to the increase in the number of flash memory chips. As we remember, the declared speed of the usb 3.0 interface is 5 Gb / s (Gigabit per second) - about 600 MB / s (megabyte per second). BUT! this is the speed of the device interface, which has nothing to do with the speed of the slowest link in the "stuffing" of the flash drive (controller, data bus and the memory chips themselves).

Here the situation is similar to the one that we examined in the article on. When the speed of work declared on the box is strikingly different from what it actually is.

Note: In the summer of 2013, a new version of the standard was released - USB 3.1, which allows you to achieve transfer speeds of 10 Gb / s (gigabit per second). I remind you that - this is only for the interface, i.e. the actual speed of the end device is much lower.

So, after installing our computer on our computer, we go to the device manager and see the following:

Naturally, to start working with a new device, the system needs its driver. Well, no one promised that everything would be easy :) We go to the website of the board manufacturer and download the driver for our operating system (Windows 7 32 bit). We install it. The device manager "says" everything went well!

After that, I immediately wanted to answer my question regarding the fact that new USB 3 devices need a special extension cable to work at maximum speed. We talked about it in the first part of this article.

Of course, you can connect the drive directly to the board and not "bother", but we must check everything carefully! Therefore, we connect our high-speed flash drive to the controller via an outdated 2.0 standard extension cable and immediately at the bottom of the screen we see this pop-up window:

As they say, as required to prove! If you want to use an extension cable with new high-speed devices, buy a special cable (it costs around 6-8 dollars).

Now, let's move on to testing. How did we conduct it? I wrote the same amount of data (about three gigabytes) on all media. Moreover, the data was an absolutely heterogeneous set of digital information: music, video clips, one large ISO file, many small files and documents, distributions of various programs and utilities.

In short, I was trying to present a typical set of data that the average user can store on the device. After all, all the measurements of write and read speed given below are of interest to us, first of all, from a practical point of view (in a real, everyday situation), and not in the form of synthetic calculations?

Testing Multiple USB 3.0 Drives

Speed measurements were carried out using two programs: "" and "" you can download them and conduct your own testing. Measurements were also taken using the tool built into Windows 7.

The photo below shows a screenshot with the result of reading (copying) the declared amount of data (three gigabytes) from the "old" 2.0 standard flash drive

The final time for which the data was completely copied to the hard drive of my computer was about four minutes. We will also be interested in the "speed" field shown in the photo above. As you can see, its average value is 13.2 MB (megabytes) per second.

The next screenshot is the same, but for the "record" indicator (I completely formatted the flash drive) and back began to write the data copied to the disk before that.

The recording lasted about fourteen minutes at the average speed shown in the photo.

Now let's do this: let's try to measure the time and speed of moving the same data on a new flash drive of the 3.0 standard, connecting it, for now, to the same slow port of the obsolete standard.

Here's what we got for the read (copy) operation from the drive to the disk.

Two minutes (against four for an old-style drive), with an average speed that is also twice as high as its counterpart - 26.5 megabytes per second.

The screenshot below shows us a photo of speed and time. records a set of heterogeneous data of three gigabytes for a high-speed flash drive:

Three minutes (against fourteen) for the old drive. Almost five times faster!

And now - attention! With bated breath, we connect a high-speed drive to a high-speed USB 3 port and naturally we expect a significant increase in performance.

First, as always, is the operation of copying our data.

One minute on a high-speed port (versus two on a slow one). To be honest, I expected a better result.

But the second test (for writing) finally upset me, where the numbers were almost the same as in the case of connecting a high-speed flash drive to a "slow" USB 2.0 port.

Let's just remember this empirical result for now and return to its analysis a little later: after all our tests are completed.

Let's run some synthetic tests now. And we'll start with Crystal Disk Mark” (download link above) and measure the speed of a USB 3.0 drive connected to a slow 2.0 port.

In the screenshot above, we can see that before the program gave the result, the test was "run" five times with a 100 megabyte file. Why did the program show three different results? The point is that the first line shows us continuous and sequential (sequence) read (read) and write (write) operations for a file of the specified size.

Line 512K shows the write and read speed for files of 512 kilobytes, and the last (third field) measures the speed for very small files up to 4 kilobytes in size. The smaller the files and the greater their total number, the more time is needed for operations on them. This is fine.

And here are the measurements for the same USB 3.0 flash drive, but connected to a high-speed 3.0 port.

Remember the very first screenshot in this article and the speeds declared on the packaging: (100 and 20 megabytes / s for reading and writing)? As you can see - very close to the truth!

Now is the time to recall our results of real data copying, where a high-speed device connected to a slow (2.0) and fast (3.0) ports for operations records showed almost the same results.

In the test above, we see the same situation! Operation reading(Read) - a sharp jerk forward, and the speed records(Write) remains virtually unchanged.

Let's bring in another program to help" AS SSD Benchmark"(download link - above) and see what it will show?

What is the screenshot below telling us? We chose our device (an 8 GB Silicon Power usb 2.0 flash drive) from the list of drives and ran a sequential test for it for read and write operations.

We see that the speed measurement was: for reading 16.56 megabytes / s and for writing - 4.66 megabytes per second. If you remember from the first screenshots of our testing, they are quite at the level of the results that we saw when actually copying and reading data from the drive (there were 13.2 for reading and 3.7 for writing).

Now, - let's take a measurement for our high-speed drive connected to the same "slow" port 2.0.

As you can see: 33 MB / s for reading and 19.48 MB / s for writing (against 26.5 and 16.8 in a real test when moving 3 GB files). Very similar values, which means - close to the reliability of the results.

Pay attention to the field " acc. time" (Access time - access time) in the screenshot above. It indicates the delay between the command to transfer data and, in fact, the time they start copying. This is exactly the reason (among others) that does not allow a high-speed usb 3 device to accelerate to those speeds that end users expect from it, i.e. - we are with you.

Now is the time to connect our new drive to port 3.0 and capture the result:

As expected, the speed of the operation records remained almost unchanged, but the result of reading from the device pleased (91.63 megabytes per second). The delay time (Access Time) has also decreased, which indicates a better optimization of the controller when accessing flash memory cells.

Now, here are a few screenshots that will show us the operation of our Seagate 500 GB USB 3.0 external drive, which we mentioned at the beginning of the article. Here is his photo:

Let's try to evaluate the real speed of our external hard drive by "feeding" it the same amount of information that we previously used for a flash drive. First, connect the HDD to a slower (2.0) USB port on the computer and write test.

Three gigabytes were copied to an external drive from a computer in two minutes and thirty seconds at an average speed shown in the photo above.

Now we will carry out the same test (for writing), but by connecting the hard drive to the "native" high-speed 3.0 port of the PC.

Recording time, in this case, was one minute and fifteen seconds (half as long), at twice the speed.

Now let's try to run the same two tests using the "AS SSD Benchmark" program. Connect the drive to port 2.0 and run the program:

Now - to the high-speed usb 3.0 connector:

A bit of an unexpected result! :) But I checked several times - the picture did not change. This, apparently, confirms the idea that purely synthetic tests should be treated with a certain degree of caution.

Now, as I promised at the beginning of the article, I will express my subjective opinion about the testing and the results obtained with it.

It turned out like this for me: in order to feel a significant increase in speed from using a USB 3.0 flash drive, it is even necessary to connect it to the "native" high-speed blue port. Especially if it is simply not on your computer! In itself, the presence of several parallel-operating chips in the drive already gives a significant increase in speed.

Additionally, connecting to port 3.0, unfortunately, does not give the expected increase in speed (primarily for write operations), apparently due to the presence of other "bottlenecks" in the design (data bus, delays introduced by the controller before the start of transmission, etc. ).

Let's calculate the money: a high-speed flash drive for 8 gigabytes will cost about $ 20 (against five for the usual old 2.0 standard). We have given the tests above. You can visually estimate the increase in speed by about 4-5 times. Further - the choice is yours. Is it worth it to pay the "extra" $15 to get a more comfortable work with large amounts of data? Personally for myself, I decided: "It's worth it!" :)

I repeat, even if your computer does not have a specialized USB 3.0 port, you will feel a big difference! The potential of the new interface, in my case, was more fully revealed only when using an external USB 3.0 hard drive connected to the PC's high-speed port.

Of course, you should not flatter yourself in vain about all these 5Gbit / s, 10Gbit / s. As we have already said, this is a potential interface speed that has little in common with the real one. We can get a good speed boost from using the new technology right now. What, in fact, I wish you, dear readers, and see you in the following articles on the pages of our site!

If the USB device and platform support data transfer in USB3.0 mode at a speed of 5 Gb / s, then, it would seem, nothing prevents you from seeing it with your own eyes. There are many utilities for this, and our research contributed to the search for an answer to this question. In addition, if the drive demonstrates a speed significantly exceeding 50-60 MB / s, then we can say that this is the super speed , since in USB 2.0 mode such a speed is physically unattainable, and there are no "intermediate" options. But not everything is so simple...

Why is everything so difficult

For various reasons, full support for the new Universal Serial Bus modes in the system information utilities is somewhat delayed. As a result, we often see only differentiation between USB1 and USB2 and recognition of a USB3 connection as USB2. In addition, the information received from the device descriptors declares its potential capabilities, and not the current speed mode, which is purely hardware-selected. According to the USB specification, the contents of the descriptors should depend on the set speed, but device developers do not always follow this rule. In the end, no matter what result (USB2 or USB3) we see, there is reason to doubt.

Taking into account the constant improvement of read-ahead and lazy write technologies, drawing conclusions based solely on the speed of copying files on a hard disk will be methodologically incorrect, although with large file sizes (a few gigabytes), such a criterion has the right to life. But there is a more radical, and therefore more reliable way - to get information directly from the registers of the USB 3.0 xHCI controller by writing a small UEFI application in assembler for this.

Experiment conditions and system objects

Platform - laptop ASUS N750JK, and the connected USB 3.0 device is a hard drive Transcend StoreJet 35T3. The target will be the USB3.0 xHCI controller register fields indicating the connection type. Note that depending on the speed mode (USB2 or USB3), the controller "sees" the device through one of two groups of registers.

Rice.1 . bits registerPort N Status and Control USB2indicate type connections: Low-Speed, Full-Speedorhigh-speed

Rice.2 . bits registerPort N Status and Control USB3indicate type connections: Super Speed

CheckUSB Utility

Source texts are prepared in Flat Assembler 1.71.17 format. The CheckUSB utility is designed to run in an x64 UEFI environment. The current version only supports Intel 8 Series system logic, USB 3.0 mode must be enabled in CMOS Setup. Such a binding is associated, firstly, with the support of a wide range of registers specific to this system logic and not provided for by the xHCI controller specification, and secondly, in order to simplify, the calculation of address offsets and dimensions of a number of register fields, as well as setting the number of ports, is implemented for particular case, namely the given system logic. Detailed information is contained in the document:

Intel 8 Series / C220 Series Chipset Family Platform Controller Hub (PCH).datasheet. June 2013

For enthusiasts who want to expand the functionality of our simplest example and implement support for various sets of system logic, we recommend the document:

Extensible Host Controller Interface for Universal Serial Bus (xHCI).revision 1.1

In addition, it is recommended to replace direct access to the PCI configuration space and memory-mapped I / O with calls to the corresponding UEFI protocols.

Analyzing the results

So, the utility worked, the report was generated.

Rice. 3

Let's pay attention to the list of connections to the ports of the USB controller. First, there are three devices that are part of the laptop, and the fourth is our desired external hard drive Transcend StoreJet 35T3. SuperSpeed mode is on. A detailed analysis of the contents of the register fields is given.

Summary

A low-level study performed at the level of physical access to the USB3.0 xHCI controller registers in the UEFI firmware environment clearly indicates that Super Speed mode is enabled. However, the serviceability of the equipment is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for its correct operation in an operating system session. The cause of problems can be, for example, the xHCI controller driver or the OS itself. Therefore, a logical continuation would be to conduct a similar experiment in an OS session, for example, Windows. This task is more difficult, since the controller registers are a privileged system resource that requires writing your own driver to access. In addition, during the operating system session, its regular driver interacts with the USB controller, you need to take care of conflict-free.

This material is suitable for beginners and professionals. Some are often concerned about the question of how to determine the type of USB port. This is especially difficult when all ports in a laptop are marked in black, although the specifications say that USB 3.0 and 2.0 are present. The truth is not written from which side.

This article will not only help identify USB 3.0, but also try to distinguish a fake. The article will be small, but it will fully help you figure out what's what.

Determine the type of USB port using Windows

Now I will try to show everything programmatically, and then we will look at the ports themselves. Most of you know that USB ports have versions 1.0 , 2.0 And 3.0 . Now there is already version 3.1, but it doesn't matter. To determine the type of USB port, you need to go to the Device Manager. In Windows 10 right click on the start menu and select the appropriate item (or press the combination Win+X and do the same).

As soon as the window opens, look for the tab "USB Controllers" and open it. There we can see a lot of drivers for USB ports. If one of the devices has the word "xHCI", then this is USB 3.0, everything else refers to USB 2.0.

Easily? Then we move on to the next version of the definition.

How to determine the type of USB port by appearance?

Let's start with the very first version - USB 1.0, now this option is practically not used in laptops, but it does take place in some mice and other devices. It looks like this:white port c 4 contacts- this is USB 1.0.

USB 2.0 usually painted black and inside it also has 4 contacts. The second type is compatible with USB 1.0, but differ only in bandwidth. The second type is faster.

In this example, we examined a flash drive, but what does the connector look like, for example, in a laptop?This is what it looks like:

Almost no different. An important point - some manufacturers can paint the same USB 2.0 in a different color, for example, orange. Of course, this does not affect the characteristics of the interface in any way.

USB 3.0 looks like blue port And has 9 pins. Four are in front, the other five are in the back. Look closely. The ones at the back are slightly raised. If the material is blue, then it is definitely USB 3.0. Also, on some computers next to the connector you can see the inscription "SS", which indicates the maximum data transfer rate (Super Speed).

Sometimes you can see USB 2.0, which is also blue, and how to understand this? As I said, developers can use any design. You can determine the USB type by the number of pins.

I would like to note that USB 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 are compatible with each other, so you can safely use them as you please. For example, insert a USB 2.0 connector into 3.0, although the speed here will be at 2.0.

So, to summarize, now I will once again describe the features of USB ports:

USB 1.0