In Gordon's voice: "It depends on what your definition of USB 4 is"

I can't think of anything with a worse naming convention than USB. It's just been so consistently useless for multiple generations now.

TLDR: Thunderbolt 3/4 only provides 32Gbps for data, the other 8Gbps of the often claimed 40Gbps on Thunderbolt is set aside for other protocols like Displayport over Thunderbolt. USB4 on the other hand can use the entire 40Gbps of its bandwidth for data and therefore can achieve higher transfer rates than TB3/4

Shame how USB was such a nice straightforward thing initially and slowly morphed into confusion. Either way; this will be amazing for small form factor systems needing extra storage!

It's cool to see that decades later and multiple retroactive renames the only thing you can expect to work reliably is USB 3.0 and 2.0, and that Asmedia are still the only decent USB drive controllers

Oh the good old days of boot/maximum PC, when both Gordon and me had hair......😭😭

USB is starting to get as confusing as SCSI, maybe a new standard will come along to save us

Well this is disappointing that the two USB4 ports on my X670E Taichi, a $500 board, are not able to reach the full 40Gb/s.

I cannot believe that, "We didn't say it was 'USB4', we said it was 'USB 4'," would fly in any court, if the USB consortium were to actually sue. The judge would say, "pull the other one, it's got bells on!"

Excellent video. Thank you! And yeah.... data transfer speed marketing vs data transfer speed realized is definitely not the same😂

2.8 GB/sec over a wire is still pretty darn good. You tested with Intel laptops and an AMD motherboard, what about an Intel motherboard with Maple Ridge + z690/z790? Also, what about on a Macintosh? Apple claims to have "USB4" ports, but how fast are they when connected to a drive enclosure with the new AsMedia usb4 chip?

Handy to know about the space in the naming. Thank you.

5:06 Asus laptops and a beta BIOS that enables USB4 support… where have I heard that one before. Oh right, the Zenbook S13 with Ryzen 7 6800U, where Asus originally promised USB4 support, but then did a 180. I have a Zenbook S13 and I’m still mad about that.

Just a side note. Doesn't mean those drives are bad. They are still the top 3 nvme enclosures and no doubt PCWorld carefully picked them for that reason. All of them are top-end and you can easily edit 4k video off of them. What is more worrying to me is how much worse everything else in the $80+ range is.

wait for usb5 - it is on the way along with wifi7 - sure they are bound to screw it up a bit but respins and bios updates should eventually unlock the full potential of nvme

All this time I've never had a USB drive with a type C connection let alone anything faster than 100 MB / sec lol

Not only that, but you got ASUS who have not delivered on there promise of introducing USB4 via a Bios Update on the Asus Zenbook S 13 OLED equipped with a Ryzen 7 6800U which Gordon reviewed almost a year ago. Gordon was given a Bios Update directly from ASUS (not yet released to the general public) with USB4 enabled, but still nothing to this day. The Laptop has been fantastic, just this one minor omission that is frustrating... Don't know if Gordon or the Team have any further information in relation to this, if so would be of help. Thanks

Thrat hair joke cracked me up!

Ah, motherboard manufacturers trying to cut corners… like I've *_never_* seen that before! 😅 Sadly, it ain't quite as easy as it once was to fix though. At least, not unless you can get full PCIE expansion cards running the full spec bandwidth.

I didn't even know USB 4 was available. Everything I own still just brands with USB 3, and I haven't heard of any USB 4 devices either. Maybe I'd have run into some if I was looking for portable SSDs, but I'm not.

every usb since 3.0 is still a mess...

I'll never forgive the USB IF for the naming conventions.

Thanks Gordon for a very thorough and well-done video!

Really well explained and presented. Thank you

So by the time we have Intel 15th gen we will finally have proper USB4 drives and motherboards etc supporting it correctly(on a mainstream level).. 😅

Thanks for opening our eyes

Compatibility doesn't mean the same max speed just the exchange language will function for the transfer. Some ports like for thunderbolt don't change connection contacts for the USB arrangement standard so there goes another slow down. What is good is being able to have an enclosure that can still handle old and new connections.

I have a USB m.2 enclosure velcroed to my laptop lid. I installed Fedora on it and it runs great for lightweight use web, email, etc.

Wait, Gordon with hair? Surely that's an AI generated image.

Gordon is love.

USB 3: Hold my beer! USB 3.1, the other 3.1, 3.2, etc.

Thanks for Captioning the video!!

I think USB 4.0 / PCIe 4.0 is a bit missleading , 40 Gbit is basically 4 Lanes PCIe 3.0 NVME Performance . I dont see a big Difference between 3200 vs 3800 = yes 20 % , but only with big Files = continued writing and even thats only half true because if the DRAM and SLC Cache limit is reached , writing speeds will go down drastically , if you use QLC it can be even lower than HDD speed ~ 50 -100 MB sec . But yes , if an new Controller from AS Media is faster and cheaper , why not use it ? Yes USB naming scheme is braindead with its renaming of existent Standards , they simply should have been added the Speed = USB3 5 GBit , USB3 10 GBit , USB3 20 GBIT , USB4 20 GBit / USB4 40 GBit and you would have known what you can expect .

USB-IF cursed and blessed the community when they divorced the USB-C connector standard and the data transmission standard.

So questionable controllers abound, on top of naming snafu. I feel the uptake of USB4 to be oddly slow too. Wondering if some of these controllers were made before final ratification of the spec (outside of the blatant thunderbolt 3 controllers being paraded as 4 taking advantage of the idiotic naming conventions)

Ohhh I hope you never fall into the hole that is made of USB-cables...

I went through much of the same research on my systems. The key to finding where the bottleneck was starting with the M.2/nVME interface and recognizing it is based on PCIE, so you have to be aware of whether the support is Gen3 or Gen4 speeds (Gen3 being 3500mBs and Gen4 being 7000mBs). It doesn't matter how fast the wire to the enclosure is rated at but rather what gen PCIE interface is tied to the M.2. I use Samsung drives almost exclusively and Samsung Magician will query the drive to tell you the speed of the interface that it is plugged into. I put a Gen4 drive into an enclosure (supposedly rated as USB4 ) and the drive reported it was attached to a Gen3 interface and would only support half of its rated throughput-no where close to the 40gbs rate that it was sold as. When I went back to the manufacturer they admitted they had NO product that would support a Gen4 drive at it's rated speed. HTH

In the beginning there was RS232. There were many flavors of RS232, and if you did anything wrong, you could burn up the RS232 connection, and get nothing. Chaos ensued, and various more complex solutions were concocted to overcome this chaos. Then came Other flavors of RS232 ( RS485, and others) where the risk of burning something up was eliminated, and things were better, but not perfect. Then came the glory of USB. Everything was designed to work together, and the universe was good, and chaos was greatly reduced. USB 1, USB 2, and USB 3 came with all their communication goodness without too much chaos. Recently something has happened to the glorious simplicity of USB, and strange names have been coined that don't really reflect the actual capability of newer USB standards. So now chaos has returned to the quiet USB universe. Maybe it's time for a new standard beyond USB. But we need to try to recapture the elegant simplicity of USB 3.0 (past 3.0, and things get chaotic).

Thunderbolt 3 is already very fast for most needs. With speed matching the internal drive of my macbook. I already do some of my work and run apps stored in a WD black inside a tb3 enclosure.

Thank God USB 3 got sorted out...

More Framework videos would be nice.

What about the HyperDrive us4 ssd enclosure or the satechi usb4 ssd enclosures

Not to mention that there is no way to "test" the USB4 port itself. I have fried two enclosures just plugging them in. Thank goodness that the NVMe was not damaged.

Its stange , after all these it still feels the stopgap interface of estata still feels like the most stress-free and most likely to work vs usb 3,XX update, it feels strange how messy usb3 and its off shots come off, heck it was kind crazy around 2010 it was to find native usb3 support on stuff.

To fix it, we can just have USB4.0, USB4.1gen1, USB4.1gen1TBlite, USB4.3betamax, and USB4.2x2at3.2x1speed

This is very insightful. Thanks

I bought the zike drive and put a crucial t500 in it But it does NOT work on the thunderbolt 4 port on my acer spin 5 dp513-55N (its not even detected). But it works just fine over usb. My advice from what I could find check your drivers first! Because the newest tb4 drivers aren't the entire story. Apparently your NVM (just nvm) drivers needs to have st least 46 that's what zike told me.

I've been using an NVMe enclosure really fast on USB-4

Had no idea there was this issue. LTT seems to have covered it a while back, but I wasn't in the market for one back then and ignored it. Bought a USB3.1 NVME enclosure instead - didn't really need speed and it only cost $25.

I think USB4 is pretty cut and dry, what isn't is the market around it skirting the specific spec with slightly altered namings. The way to prevent this is for USB-IF to trademark the alternate names for the sole purpose of disallowing them in marketing. Furthermore, USB-If needs to find some legal language that says companies that use these alternate namings, or anything lesser than the actual USB4 spec, face some kind of repercussion for walking the line of false advertising. I've said it before, and I'll continue saying it, but USB5 needs to come fast, and it needs to fix every open-ended issue USB4 currently has, where USB5 needs to be _the_ spec and _the only_ spec with no room for interpretations or bodged implementations for compatibility's sake; USB5 needs to be absolutely cut and dry across the board and across the industry. Which also means that USB5 needs to clean up any other PD issues that still exist, and needs to clean up various tunneling and alt mode nuances and just make an outright unified standard for it. Another thing that needs cleaned up is the braindead naming schemes and implementations, again USB5 needs to be a singular spec, no more generations, no more single or dual lane, no more symmetric or asymmetric with different nominal speeds, there needs to be one speed full stop, with major increases being a new spec; for example, the gen 2 single lane to gen 3 single lane jump being a doubling, the gen 3 single lane to gen 4 jump being a quadrupling on sym or a hextupling on asym, I know the spec is moving fast but USB4 Gen 4 should've been USB5, and USB5 should've been asym for purposes of simplicity. I also wish a future PD spec could allow for daisy-chained one-cable setups, where there's power overhead for downstream devices, for example if I have a laptop, a display, and downstream peripherals, I want want them daisy chained to a singular wall wart, but as it currently stands I am limited to what individual ports can put out and overheads are so limited to where that setup requires at least two if not three wall warts. At the same time, I also want this implementation to carry data as intended, say I add some external drives, an eGPU, etc., into the mix, I still want a daisy-chained solution where there's virtually only one wire from one endpoint to the other. Essentially, I want a future USB spec to not only be the universal serial bus, but also the universal power bus, and not that but also the universal power and data backbone for setups, where a virtual one-wire implementation is possible, where a secondary branch wire is only needed in the event of a temporary device being added to the ecosystem. I say 'virtual one-wire' due to the fact that there are multiple wires, but a device is the common end point for two cables and thus ties those two loose ends into one extension; at least this is until we get a spec that allows for a singular true wire with multiple plugs, like a hub but rather than a block with multiple wires it's literally just a wire that meets multiple devices at the device with no additional cables needed, and honestly this might be the solution for the idea of a single-cable backbone as this could at least provide a discrete power rail, though flexibility takes a hit. Honestly I just want the spaghetti of wires to go away, especially as wireless isn't catching up in some areas (such as displays) and wireless still needs a temporary cable for power needs; for example I currently have six individual wires in my setup, two power and four peripherals, with one additional wireless peripheral with its own charging cable, yet this could easily be consolidated into a singular wire if USB and PD allowed for it, albeit that additional wireless peripheral would be a case of where a branch is needed for the sake of simplicity, and this issue gets exacerbated when I add a pre-USB4 Type C hub into the mix as it requires its own power source if your host doesn't have ~15w output or you're adapting to a Type A port. I just want things to be clean without the need for ample cable management, because even with the best cable management you'll run into issues if anything ever needs to be changed.

USB4 is confusing Gordon...

What. A. Mess.

USB4 and Thunderbolt 4 are already outdated. We need more bandwidth especially for eGPU docks with NVMe storage, memory card readers, dual 10G AVB NICs and other extra ports. We really need PCIe 5.0 x4.

USB has been a mess since 2.0, change my mind.

Great information! 3GB/s vs 3.8 shouldn't matter to most people so it is good to see lickety split speeds are a norm

Hrm so what does that "40" mean next to the USB 4 ports on the Asus board? If it were Gbps that would be 5GB/s right?

so a drive can identify as a USB4 drive but it needs to call it self USB 4.0 drive

That's a bummer, I've been watching for a good deal on the Orico

Dammit where’s mine? Spose you were early bird…

And hasnt this stuff already been tested when thunderbolt originally came out claiming 40gpbs. People were testing thunderbolt enclosures like the G-Drive to see if they were getting what they paid for. Im even more confused than when i hit play.

Sheesh - there are so few fully functional AM5 motherboards (ones with a PS/2 port, to use God's Keyboard, the IBM Model M) -- now we have to look extra-hard for motherboards with true USB4 also??

I didn't even hear about usb4 being available

well that sucks, i too have the asus x670e gene motherboard like gordon and was going to populate the two USB4 ports with with these USB4 drives after i had populated the three onboard nvme's

They need a thunderbolt 5 with PCIe 5.0x4 so that it has 128Gbps...that would open up a whole new world of possible I/O devices and accessories, like eGPUs without a loss in performance.

4:05 lol

Sigh, just shut down USB and keep developing Thunderbolt

It does have to be noted that the 40Gbps spec in the USB-4 standard is "upto" 40Gbps, not a guarantee of 40Gbps.. There are SO many factors that can reduce that - like the cable you choose. Meanwhile, I'm beside myself if I can get 200MBps... so...

FML, I just picked up a lenovo X1 nano with 11th gen Intel chip. It has TB 4 ports, but it looks like they cap out at 32gbps... Thank God the laptop was a good deal on a mega discount

I just want something that's backwards compatible with literally everything since the dawn of USB...is that so much to ask for? What does the word "Universal" even mean anymore? This product looks like it tickles those boxes.

Hello, I can't find any video on youtube that compares Satechi with ziketech. Have you already tried the Satechi model? Please help us, we need an expert.

I still dont get it. It literally says on the IO shield for thunderbolt 3 that its 40gbps. so everyone literally lied to us?

the folks behind USB need to get their shit together... this is horrible for consumers

framework 😍

USB naming in general is an absolute nightmare. You don't really look through what you get for your money. USB with its Gen 1 to Gen 3 and their underscore 1, 2 also gives 3? The drop in naming will also be determined for USB 4 ford law.

I can't remember last time I used my external SSD stick, would be nice if all computers had 10Gbe lan ports by now, with optional 25Gbe or 100Gbe, instead we barely start seeing 2.5Gbe onboard, it's pathetic when you realize NVME PCIe 3.0 (~30Gbit) has been here for 8 years already and yet many enclosures barely go anywhere close to that, as seen in the video

ASUS ThunderboltEX 4, GIGABYTE GC-MAPLE RIDGE, ASRock THUNDERBOLT 4 AIC 2.0, and i'm sure most other Thunderbolt 4 expansion cards, all use PCIe 3.0 x4 which should only be capable of 4 GB/s while advertising 40gbps speeds which confuses me. i'm hoping some proper USB4 expansion cards come out for PCIe 4.0 x4 slots

omg!! he said the magic word!! ''hopefully one day'' !! may be the frown-hopper usb institute will make a patch! till then! haven't heard about anything cooking yet!

Poor Gordon's hair );

Part of the problem is companies playing games to get out of paying the USB royalties.

Root cause of this issue is Thunderbolt Whenever Apple steps in, things get ugly That is the merge of USB and Thunderbolt

Could you please check compatibility of USB4 with Thunderbolt 3 audio interfaces (Antelope Audio, UAD Apollo and so forth) ?

at this point USB is not a standard, more so a port than can operate with many different pin configurations. There should be wider contact USB C standards with notches to prevent non PD cables to go in and what not. but still offering the niche anyside is right to plug in.

by this point, why do we not get Networking over USB? 40Gigs is so much faster than anything you can get in LAN stuff and cheaper to boot . .

Weridly enough is that USB3.2 gen2x2 (type-C) 20Gbps at the front performs better than USB4(Type-C) 40Gbps at the back (Especially Write speed). I am using ADATA NVME3.0 SX8200 1TB with SSD HYPERDRIVE NEXT USB4 box and X670E ROG GENE. .USB3.2 gen2x2 (type-C) 20Gbps: R/W ~2000/2000 .USB4 40Gbps: R/W ~2000/1200

How does it function on the newest gen of Macbook Pros with M1 Pro and M2 Pro? these support USB4 and thunderbolt 4

USB 'C' is also a bit of a mess in my book, with multiple flavours of it, some do video, some do power delivery.... so unless you know the finer details of every port on your computer, your results of trying to plug in that latest bit of kit maybe somewhat disappointing.

I have questions. I bought a usb c hub with sd card reader and I notice the sd card is not reading or writing the mac speed .

hearing 3.x gb per seconds is like... I take the worst of those ;) Just transfering 2TB over effectly USB 2.0 ;) (just right now, since yesterday ) 🤪

USB 4.0 and below are compatible, can the USB 3.2 20g USB 3.2 GEN2x2 20Gbps port run up to 20g? Or is it the same as the Thunderbolt hard drive box that slows down to 10G at the 20G port?

How about if using pcie 4x cards add on

Also Gbps and GB/s (which is used in PCIe versions) is very confusing, at the beginning of the video I thought (huh, if it's a USB4 drive it should be 40GB/s but no, it's 40Gbps which is something completely different. Annoying

The usb type c grows into 40Gbps or 20Gbps, but what about our ethernet? we just has a realtek 2.5G ethernet without issues, why, maybe we should say who stop/slows down the ethernet speed grows?

Will you benefit from a USB4/Thunderbolt4 cable that can transfer 40 Gbps at 15 feet, instead of the 6 feet?

I'm so done with this mess. TB4 it is

I have long given up on trying to understand or trust USB devices, or cables.

So its not usb4 that's messy, but vendors not hitting spec.

So USB is still a mess? Surprise surprise.

isn't time to drop the universal form the name ?

What a mess.

In a world where the cloud is the nectar of life, why would buy a USB 4 drive when they can go buy a Big Mac instead.?