Front I/O vs Back?

[Venomz1337]

I was randomly thinking about it and I've got a question;

 

Would plugging a USB into the front i/o produce slower read and write speeds than plugging it into the back would?

 

My theory behind this is the fact that front I/O's are run by a cable which is then connected on the motherboard whereas the back I/O is soldered on to it (I would assume).

 

What are your thoughts?

 

 

[Samfisher]

The cables have nothing to do with speed really.  The front panel is usually connected to a third party chip and not the chipset, usually by ASMedia.  They can be slower but not by much.  The fragmentation of your external HDD will play a bigger role in file transfers than the limitations of the front panel USB.

[ShadowCaptain]

Should make no real difference

[Venomz1337]

1 minute ago, Samfisher said:

The cables have nothing to do with speed really.  The front panel is usually connected to a third party chip and not the chipset, usually by ASMedia.  They can be slower but not by much.  The fragmentation of your external HDD will play a bigger role in file transfers than the limitations of the front panel USB.

 

I would've thought fragmentation would only matter if it was a mechanical hard drive. Even though it may be a small hit, how small is it and how would it affect a fast USB?

[Samfisher]

Just now, Venomz1337 said:

 

I would've thought fragmentation would only matter if it was a mechanical hard drive. Even though it may be a small hit, how small is it and how would it affect a fast USB?

Oh I do mean mechanical HDD's, unless you meant USB sticks.  Then those are far too slow to ever saturate USB3 speeds anyway and you'll never hit the limit on what we have now.  If you have a USB3.0 SSD however, that's a different story.  At most 10% slower.

[Venomz1337]

1 minute ago, Samfisher said:

Oh I do mean mechanical HDD's, unless you meant USB sticks.  Then those are far too slow to ever saturate USB3 speeds anyway and you'll never hit the limit on what we have now.  If you have a USB3.0 SSD however, that's a different story.  At most 10% slower.

 

10% can make a big difference in speeds. I think you're right in terms of the USB stick speeds. Cheers for the responses.

[DebatED Nothing]

9 minutes ago, Venomz1337 said:

I was randomly thinking about it and I've got a question;

 

Would plugging a USB into the front i/o produce slower read and write speeds than plugging it into the back would?

 

My theory behind this is the fact that front I/O's are run by a cable which is then connected on the motherboard whereas the back I/O is soldered on to it (I would assume).

I know you've already been answered, but I just want to explain why cables wont have an effect. USB is a digital interface, the data is sent through the cable as 1s and 0s, which are assigned to voltages of 0v and something else (maybe 2v, idk) but basically, those two signals are basically impossible to confuse, so the quality of the cable doesn't matter (see Linus' video on the $1000 HDMI cable). In terms of physically travelling down the cable, the electric field propagates at the speed of light, there is basically no travel time for a current, do not confuse this with electrons though electrons move very slowly in the cables.

[Samfisher]

Just now, Venomz1337 said:

 

10% can make a big difference in speeds. I think you're right in terms of the USB stick speeds. Cheers for the responses.

Just as a reference, USB3.0 has a theoretical limit of 5Gbps which is 640MB per sec, about the same as SATA3.

[Venomz1337]

2 minutes ago, DebatED Nothing said:

I know you've already been answered, but I just want to explain why cables wont have an effect. USB is a digital interface, the data is sent through the cable as 1s and 0s, which are assigned to voltages of 0v and something else (maybe 2v, idk) but basically, those two signals are basically impossible to confuse, so the quality of the cable doesn't matter (see Linus' video on the $1000 HDMI cable). In terms of physically travelling down the cable, the electric field propagates at the speed of light, there is basically no travel time for a current, do not confuse this with electrons though electrons move very slowly in the cables.

 

Electricity is something I have no idea about  

 

Interesting though

[Oshino Shinobu]

There would be some more latency (just by the fact that the electrical signals have to travel for longer from the front I/O), but that's nothing that a mere human can perceive. There shouldn't be any difference in read/write, provided the ports are of the same spec and are using the same controller. 

 

Only one that really matters is the audio ports. Front audio I/O can often have a fair bit of interference, so I'd use rear I/O only for that. 

[DebatED Nothing]

3 minutes ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

There would be some more latency

Micro seconds. If that.

[Oshino Shinobu]

4 minutes ago, DebatED Nothing said:

Micro seconds. If that.

The difference is minuscule. Considering electrical signals travel pretty close to the speed of light, a 20cm internal cable wouldn't even make nanoseconds of difference. 

 

The actual delay increase would be around 8.339e-10, or 0.0000000008339 seconds.

[DebatED Nothing]

28 minutes ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

The difference is minuscule. Considering electrical signals travel pretty close to the speed of light, a 20cm internal cable wouldn't even make nanoseconds of difference. 

 

The actual delay increase would be around 8.339e-10, or 0.0000000008339 seconds.

As a physics student I really should have the order of the SI prefixes sorted out in my head, I somehow thought that it went milli, nano, micro. Need to remember "Microsoft Made No Profit From Anybodies Zunes, Yo" https://xkcd.com/992/