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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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 It was soon superseded by USB 2.0.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.