Leo, can I buy a one-terabyte drive, USB 3.0 and have it work on my computer
with a 2.0 USB?
In this excerpt from
Answercast #79, I look at the compatibility built into USB 2 and USB 3 ports
and devices.
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Using USB 3 on a USB 2 computer
Fortunately, the answer to this one is nice and clear, “Yes, you can!” In fact, it reminds me of a small story that I ran into myself.
I actually purchased a one-terabyte external drive – one of my Seagate Free Agent drives that I recommend regularly. I received it and plugged it into a computer.
I didn’t really think that much of it. I did the usual formatting and backup and so forth.
Sudden speed increase!
I’m now using it on my Mac as my backup drive for the Mac’s backup program. And I noticed that the backups were actually being very, very fast. Much faster than I expected.
As it turned out… I suddenly realized that this particular MacBook Pro that I have (it’s one of the Retina models from earlier this year) actually has USB 3 support!
What I didn’t realize is that the USB 3.0 compatible device that I had just purchased actually had a USB 3.0 device to plug into – in the form of my Mac; and it’s working out very, very well.
USB 2 can run USB 3 device
The device will still connect to my USB 2.0 supporting devices just fine and I can do whatever I need with it.
So, the short answer is yes. The longer answer is yes, absolutely.
There’s lots of compatibility built into the way USB is designed and this happens to be one of them. It’s a very easy in fact to overlook. In fact, the device you have may be running at a higher speed than you think!
(Transcript lightly edited for readability.)
Next from Answercast 79 – Are there problems if you put too many large files on your desktop?
I recently purchased a 2-Port USB 3.0 PCI Express Expansion Card which fit an unused PCI Express slot on my three-year-old Dell XPS 8000. I also purchased a 2 TB Seagate external hard drive which I use with Macrium Reflect. It now takes only about one-third to one-half the time to backup my computer vs. the time it used to take. Total investment was only about $120.
Of course, your right, a USB 3 will work in a USB 2 slot, the only thing you didn’t mention is the it will only work at the slower USB 2 speeds. But, you will be ready when you do upgrade your computer and the speeds do make a lot of differents. You will really note this when working with really big files, like videos, complete backups, etc.
I’ll just add if I may a word of warning about cables: A USB3 drive will only accept a USB3 cable at the drive end, but the USB end will plug into USB2 or 3. USB3 ports are colored blue.
Also, I recently had a problem with a 340GB USB2 drive: it took a few minutes to be recognized by windows, and then it reported some files were missing, couldn’t be found even though listed. Also I could not scan it, check it or defrag it. So, after a few attempts I tried it on a different computer, it worked fine. But I tried it with a different cable too, and the cable was the only problem. I bought a new USB2 cable and problem solved! So before panicking or ditching a suspect USB drive try a different cable!
I know about the backwards compatibility of USB 3 to USB 2. There’s tons of info all over the ‘net. My question is – what, if ever was USB 1?
External usb 3 drives wll work into a usb 2 pc system, the port in the external drive will accept usb 3 plugs or usb 2 plugs.
@Snert
USB 1 was around in the late 90s. It was soon superseded by USB 2.0.
USB 1 was slow. I maintain a computer that only has USB 1 ports. When I need to copy files to/from my USB stick, it takes a lot longer than when I copy the files to/from my laptop.
I, like Leo, wasn’t aware of USB 3 until I got my external HD this summer. I was disappointed to find out that my 6 month old laptop did not have USB 3 ports. So my backups are not lightning quick.