Where are the USB 3.0 Notebooks?

Although we’ve had the capability of adding USB 3.0 support to our PCs for almost a year, the number of capable devices coming to market isn’t that great. But as we’ve seen with previous looks at such devices, such as OCZ’s Enyo, the benefits are clear, as the transfer speed abilities are much improved, on par with eSATA.

In fact, it’s been storage devices that have had most of the USB 3.0 attention, and it’s no wonder. Even if you have a USB 3.0 capable thumb drive, the transfer differences between 2.0 and 3.0 are stark, and if you have a huge file or many files to copy over, that speed difference is going to be hugely appreciated. Aside from these storage devices though, there haven’t been many other USB 3.0 devices on the market. Why?

The reason is no doubt the fact that most USB 2.0 devices out there couldn’t benefit in a major way by moving to USB 3.0. Printers, for example, don’t generally receive gigabytes worth of data, and even if you have a book to print, the data transfer on USB 2.0 shouldn’t take more than a couple of seconds. Then there are webcams, which could see benefits of USB 3.0 in the future, but not at the moment.

For those storage hounds, though, USB 3.0 is still quite exciting, and I’m looking forward to seeing it catch on more in the near-future. The fact that you can plug in an external hard drive and have it operate as an internal hard drive is great, especially if you just need to copy over large amounts of data to bring it elsewhere. So the question is, why on earth haven’t we seen more USB 3.0 support on our laptops?

On the desktop side, USB 3.0 is all over, even on some mainstream boards. The problem with notebooks, though, is that to keep their sizes down and internals to a minimum, vendors generally include support once it’s available through the system chipset, and as we all know… Intel has ironically been the slowest to adopt the support, by not integrating it into its current chipset.

Not all hope is lost, though, as a CNET article points out that models exist from HP with USB 3.0 support, and even from Dell. Or perhaps more interesting is the fact that the ASUS Eee PC 1015PEM also includes USB 3.0 support. That’s right… a netbook. If a netbook supports it, then why not the thousands of other notebooks?

One of the sticking points, however, of mass adoption by laptop makers is the lack of direct support in Intel chipsets, as this blog posted on a Dell-hosted Web page explains. One of the oft-cited reasons put forth by analysts for the lack of broad USB 3.0 support is that many devices, like printers, simply don’t benefit from moving to 3.0. Another reason: a number of laptops already ship with the faster eSATA standard, which Intel supports in its mobile chipsets, not to mention desktop variants. (Many HP Pavilion laptops, for example, also come with eSATA.)