Real world advantage of USB 3 Gen 2 over Gen 1

P

Pimpom

Disciple
Those of you who are using a motherboard with "only" USB 3.0 or 3.1/3.2 Gen 1 (5Gb/s), do you sometimes find yourself in situations where you wished you had Gen 2 (10Gb/s)?
To put it another way, are there times when the higher speed of a Gen 2 port would have given you a practical benefit?
To put it still another way, if you have Gen 2, you probably also have Gen 1. Do you use a device that runs significantly faster on a Gen 2 port?

I can think of one situation where one would benefit from having Gen 2. That would be with an external NVMe SSD-to-USB adapter. Any other?
 
As you know the device must also support gen2.

It only helps with substantially larger file transfers and the transfer speed also depends on the source drive and not just the destination drive.
There are a lot of factors at play. Hence no, I don't need it nor want it but it's a good to have option.

If it's gone, I won't miss it at all.
 
There are a lot of technologies these days which are getting faster just for the sake of progress and have very little practical benefit to most people.

Don't get me wrong, it's good that we have better/faster technologies, just that it doesn't mean that we all need or even can use these faster speeds.
I have multiple devices with thunderbolt ports. I have never need to use them as USB ports. I have devices which support gigabit ethernet and wi-fi 6. I don't even have a gigabit router and I never feel the need for it. I feel the benefit of Gigabit ethernet only when I transfer files from Synology NAS, which I do, on an average, once in a month. That's because I never need to transfer the files, I can directly use them from the NAS. And on normal usage, I don't feel it makes any differences as compared to when I had a 100 mbps router. The difference is noticeable only when I'm transferring files over 1 GB in size.

So to answer your question, no, you will most likely not need it nor use it. If you have a thunderbolt port, or a USB-C port supporting Alt DP mode, you might be able to use it to connect your display. Also, the protocol itself has some useful features which make life easier for people, like being able to connect a monitor to a laptop over USB-C and also charging the laptop through that cable (and sometimes also supporting a USB hub on the monitor itself). These are very useful advancements and the speed increases are needed for all these to work simultaneously over a single port/cable. But in day to day life, gen1 and gen2 are all the same.
 
Thanks for the replies. You've confirmed my feelings. It may be nice to have a car that can go over 250 km/h even if you have no roads that support going over 100. But that's all it is - "nice to have".
 
For content creators, the difference is significant when transferring gigabytes of data every day. The minutes add up. Same with backups. I do daily backups and I feel the pain of 5Gbps across my assortment of external drives when it comes to restoring from backup:

drives.png


I do have a single 20Gbps port and a single 10Gbps port (first and third line) but my USB hub has an upstream of just 5Gbps so I cannot use them at the moment. These are spinning drives so write speeds are minimally throttled but restoring from backup is frustrating when I know I have a faster port but not a hub that supports it.

Of course I realize I do not represent the majority of users but I'm sure anyone who deals with external drives or card readers for videography or photography would experience a notable difference when using a 'slower' 5Gbps port.
 
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