Microsoft to Natively Support USB 3.0 in Windows 8

[Rob Williams]

Since the introduction of USB 3.0, we have needed to install third-party drivers in Windows in order to have the ports function, which for obvious reasons hasn't been ideal. On the newly-launched Windows 8 developer blog, we're told that this problem will cease to exist with the release of Microsoft's next OS, with native USB 3.0 support out of the box.

Read the rest of our post and then discuss it here!

 

[MacMan]

Microsoft supporting USB 3.0 natively is good, but one thing is for sure is: Apple definitely won't be supporting it natively!

Then again, Microsoft won't be supporting natively Thunderbolt either which Lion already does, so I'm not all that sure why Apple would want to waste its time on doing so since they believe strongly that it will be replaced by Thunderbolt anyway..... provided, of course, that it even catches on in the first place?

Nothing wrong with USB 3.0, or Microsoft adding native support, but the original USB never caught on until Apple put it on its original iMacs. Before that very few pc OEM's had little interest in it, but now its everywhere, so I'm hoping that Thunderbolt eventually catches on when pc's finally get it early next year, because when it comes to computers you can never, ever have enough speed!

 

[marfig]

It would be a fine day indeed if they announced native USB 3.0 support was coming to Windows 7 in a later service pack. As is, this is sort of an almost not far from being a good news.

Windows XP did taught a harsh lesson to Microsoft; You can't have a good enough operating system, or people will resist upgrading. Unfortunately they learned it too well.

 

[TheCrimsonStar]

It would be a fine day indeed if they announced native USB 3.0 support was coming to Windows 7 in a later service pack. As is, this is sort of an almost not far from being a good news.

Windows XP did taught a harsh lesson to Microsoft; You can't have a good enough operating system, or people will resist upgrading. Unfortunately they learned it too well.

That's very true...I have friends who absolutely REFUSE to upgrade to 7. I finally told a few of them one day "Alright, fine. When M$ stops XP support, don't come crying to me when your computer gets f*#$ed over."

 

[Rob Williams]

Then again, Microsoft won't be supporting natively Thunderbolt either which Lion already does, so I'm not all that sure why Apple would want to waste its time on doing so since they believe strongly that it will be replaced by Thunderbolt anyway..... provided, of course, that it even catches on in the first place?

There's no need for Microsoft to support Thunderbolt, because it's not even supported on the PC hardware (it's exclusive to Apple, so it's kind of hard for Microsoft to even consider supporting it). USB 3.0 on the other hand does just what 99.9% of people who will use it need it to do, while Thunderbolt is expensive and does things most people don't need. Trust me, most people aren't going to be powering $1,000+ NAS devices, and until now, that's been the only showpiece floating around Thunderbolt support.

Thunderbolt as a whole is 2x faster theoretically than USB 3.0, but even today, most people are only using about 20% of what a USB 3.0 can use them (most consumer thumb drives do about 100MB/s, while USB 3.0 can do about 500MB/s, the most expensive SSDs for USB 3.0 do about 350MB/s).

I'll wait for the report that states Thunderbolt is expected to have 2,000,000,000 devices in 2015 like USB 3.0 is expected to and then perhaps my opinion on things will change.

Nothing wrong with USB 3.0, or Microsoft adding native support, but the original USB never caught on until Apple put it on its original iMacs. Before that very few pc OEM's had little interest in it, but now its everywhere, so I'm hoping that Thunderbolt eventually catches on when pc's finally get it early next year, because when it comes to computers you can never, ever have enough speed!

USB 3.0 launched and was affordable from the get-go, while Thunderbolt is reported to be a super expensive proposition (~$100 for the license/chipset and another $50 for the cable). At the same time, USB 1.0 and others were available on the PC platform from the start, while Thunderbolt is currently locked to Apple platforms with no real sign of it coming to the PC soon (if there's been mention, I haven't seen it).

 

[MacMan]

There's no need for Microsoft to support Thunderbolt, because it's not even supported on the PC hardware (it's exclusive to Apple, so it's kind of hard for Microsoft to even consider supporting it). .

Your totally ignoring the fact that Thunderbolt is only exclusive to Apple for one year, and there after it will becoming to the PC, and trust me, it's already a hit and will become even more so once it hits the PC side of the equation:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/thunderbolt-is-a-hit/1516

 

[Kougar]

It would be a fine day indeed if they announced native USB 3.0 support was coming to Windows 7 in a later service pack. As is, this is sort of an almost not far from being a good news.

That's how the system works. They aren't going to announce it, but I would expect it to be rolled into the next service pack. When Win8 launches Win7 will get another service pack to bridge support and features, just a matter of when.

 

[marfig]

That's how the system works. They aren't going to announce it, but I would expect it to be rolled into the next service pack. When Win8 launches Win7 will get another service pack to bridge support and features, just a matter of when.

I'm not so sure they will. USB 3.0 native support will be a huge incentive for users to upgrade. Especially those who in the next few years start to buy newer boards. Microsoft has been experimenting, since Windows XP, with purposely withholding from earlier versions new features/advancements. DirectX comes to mind.

That said, here's to hope you are right!
The fact they chose to develop an entire new USB device driver in its own software stack, without adding to the current USB 2.0 stack, I think makes it trivial the act of adding native support to older versions of the operating system. I'm more curious (and a bit worried in case I don't feel like upgrading to Windows 8) whether they will want to.

 

[Rob Williams]

Your totally ignoring the fact that Thunderbolt is only exclusive to Apple for one year, and there after it will becoming to the PC, and trust me, it's already a hit and will become even more so once it hits the PC side of the equation:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/thunderbolt-is-a-hit/1516

Because the two Thunderbolt peripherals available at the moment have wait times, it means that the interface is a "hit"? I refuse to believe that the demand for a $1,000 NAS box is so strong that it's leading to shortages. If there are shortages it's because not enough are being made.

Expect great things when many more Thunderbolt peripherals start shipping in the next 6 months.

Of which, 95%+ would work just as well on USB 3.0.

That's how the system works. They aren't going to announce it, but I would expect it to be rolled into the next service pack. When Win8 launches Win7 will get another service pack to bridge support and features, just a matter of when.

I don't see this happening. I don't think Microsoft typically rolls hardware drivers into service packs, but rather just bug fixes and other feature updates. I am not sure the comapny would want to risk adding a driver like this into its service pack when some people might already have a USB 3.0 driver installed - it could lead to issues. And like marfig mentions, this is one of those little bullet-points that Microsoft could use to encourage people to upgrade. And if the video in the article is any hint to anything, you can expect them to act like USB 3.0 is an exclusive new feature to Windows.

 

[Kougar]

I'm not so sure they will. USB 3.0 native support will be a huge incentive for users to upgrade. Especially those who in the next few years start to buy newer boards. Microsoft has been experimenting, since Windows XP, with purposely withholding from earlier versions new features/advancements. DirectX comes to mind.

Ah, good... Rob is backing you on this. *rubs hands together* We shall see!

Microsoft has always been adding built-in hardware support. Vista's SP1 literally doubled the number of drivers the OS had for various hardware, added support for Bluetooth 2.1, and did some major reworking to try and fix the horrible issues with file transfers. But every single service pack since XP SP1 has added support for new hardware technologies that have emerged. None have been as major as USB 3 perhaps, so we shall see. I can't even count the number of service packs NT and Win2k got when features & changes made in XP were backported.

DirectX 11 is fully supported on Vista SP2 today, as long as users download an additional hotfix from MS first... As for DX10 and XP, it was certainly feasible to port it into XP I'll grant, but I can understand Microsoft's explanation of it not being worth the effort.

XP's graphical stack was conceived before AGP was reaching 2x status. The GUI stack itself was not well designed, leading to instances where locks in GDI objects would lockout Explorer even when the underlying system was still fine, and other scenarios could bottleneck performance. Even worse, XP's graphical stack itself was inflexible, so it wasn't capable of supporting Crossfire and SLI natively. NVIDIA and ATI both had to spend extensive resources hacking the display stack to make their multi-GPU drivers work. The end result was the workarounds easily compromised driver stability as often as not, leading to system crashes instead of actually working. Vista and Seven's stack by comparison removed these issues and is capable of supporting multiple GPUs in multiple usage roles, even with ATI+NVIDIA drivers & hardware installed simultaneously. Honestly XP couldn't even handle two GPUs from a single manufacturer, such a concept was outside the realm of possibility when the XP graphics stack was created. Hell, XP couldn't even support >137GB sized hard drives without getting SP1... I would be willing to have bet that adding DX10 to XP would've only further negatively impacted stability, as well.

I agree that keeping USB 3 as a Win8 only feature is great from a marketing standpoint. But I'm still betting that MS will be including it whenever they do have Win 7 SP2... they might release Win 7 SP2 a few months after Win8 though, that would be typical of past service packs if they did.

 

[Rob Williams]

None have been as major as USB 3 perhaps, so we shall see. I can't even count the number of service packs NT and Win2k got when features & changes made in XP were backported.

If we were talking about a SP that was released about six months after the launch of the OS, I could begin to understand USB 3.0 support being added in, but with Windows 8 right around the corner (well, kind of... 7 has been out for two years), I don't see Microsoft being too interested in adding it in.

Your other points are interesting. I wasn't aware hardware support was typically added to service packs. Though added hardware support like that would be best-suited for the installation media, not a post-install patch, since people would already have drivers by that point.

 

[marfig]

I wasn't aware hardware support was typically added to service packs.

They usually don't. Not at this level, that is. They do add to existing hardware support, but only rarely will they add new native support. The last time I remember them doing adding an entire new device driver stack to an SP was Windows XP SP1 that added exactly support for USB 2.0. And it's easy to understand why they would do that. This was 2002. We were light years from the next OS.

 

[Kougar]

They usually don't. Not at this level, that is. They do add to existing hardware support, but only rarely will they add new native support. The last time I remember them doing adding an entire new device driver stack to an SP was Windows XP SP1 that added exactly support for USB 2.0. And it's easy to understand why they would do that. This was 2002. We were light years from the next OS.

Originally, Longhorn was slated for a late 2003 launch as just an incremental update to XP, before it became 2004 as the feature bloat began, then 2005, then finally scrapped altogether. They restarted anew in late 2004 to make Vista. So from their perspective, when they released SP1 the next OS was still right around the corner.