Has anyone done USB Networking in Win2K?

[Christianb 8]

I was wondering if anyone knew how to use their USB ports to network two PCs? Do you have to get a special cable or does any old male to male cable simply work?

Thanks in Advance,

Christian Blackburn

[Dirty Harry 0]

As far as I know a standard USB cable doesn't work, you must use a special USB cable (has a little box in the middle) and the software that comes along with the cable you buy.

 

Never tried on W2K to W2k but between W2k and W98, it works well for file transfers and such, but it is not a network.

 

If you are going to connect the computers regularely, I suggest you go for a Ethernet solution; 2 cheap NICs and a crossover cable. Much more conveniant, the cable can be longer and you don't need to install any extra software.

 

H.

[Christianb 8]

Actually ethernet is extremely slow for interconnecting only two PCs. It is ideal for large networks and economy.

[Xiven 0]

Quote:

Actually ethernet is extremely slow for interconnecting only two PCs.

Ermmm... no it isn't. Ethernet cards go at 100Mbit/s. The fastest USB network device I've seen is 11MBit/s. Someone's been giving you some false info there.

[Christianb 8]

First off there's two device speeds for USB 1.0/1.1 there's peripheral speed which is for mice and joysticks and then there's a high speed mode for video cameras and drives. The Slow is 12Mbits (lower case b - as in bits not Bytes) and the fast is 40 Mbits. Now 40Mbits is still less than 100Mbits so the next logical question is why does this guy think that 40 is faster than 100. Well it isn't but when network devices spend half their time figuring out just who in the hell they're talking to and what is their MAC Address (unique hardware identifier, every NIC has one built in it's a unique serial number and nobody else's is alike {aside from a bad batch I heard about one time in a foreign factory, where the dopes didn't know the MAC Addresses weren't supposed to match})and then what is their IP number. Whereas when you use a non networking device like a direct cable Parrallel or USB it just sends the damn data already, no who are you (MAC Address) and what your IP (TCP/IP Protocol). So yes I do think that parrallel and USB are faster for transfers between two systems. Once you widen the network of course a NIC, switches, and routers is the best solution, but I'm not trying to do that here am I.

[Xiven 0]

From: http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/us101299.htm

 

Quote:

"A group of seven PC industry leaders announced today that the target speed of Universal Serial Bus (USB) 2.0 is 40 times faster than the existing USB 1.1"

 

"The target speed of USB 2.0 is 480 Megabits per second (Mbs), ....."

 

USB 1.1 is therefore 40 times slower than 480Mb/s = 12Mb/s. Also despite extensive searching I have been unable to find any mention of 2 different speed modes of USB ports, nor of USB 1.1 ports running at 40Mb/s

 

Futhermore: (from http://www.scyld.com/usb/ethernet.html)

 

Quote:

More USB Bandwidth Discussion: Why isn't "12Mbps" USB faster than "10Mbps" Ethernet?

Errrmm, it's vastly different. You typically get 95% of Ethernet potential as user payload. It's pretty easy to predict the performance just with just a few simple rules. Adding a new device does add the potential for more collisions, but contention-select does not have a big impact on Ethernet capacity.

 

USB has, at best, 80% of its capacity available for user payload. Typical results are 50% and lower. Devices that quote data rates still put "12Mbps" on the box. (I've even seen this with slow 1.5Mhz devices!)

 

Conclusion:

 

USB 2.0 when it comes out properly will be almost 5 times as fast as Ethernet (at least theoretically), but USB 1.1 is currently limited to 12Mb/s and is in actual fact a lot slower. So much so that a 12Mb/s USB network is actually slower than a lowly 10Mb/s ethernet, so even if a 40 Mb/s USB network adapter exists, it will still not be anywhere near as fast as a 100Mb/s ethernet NIC.

 

Add to that the fact that networking 2 PCs with ethernet is in fact very cheap (2 NICS @ $15 each and a crossover cable @ $10) and there's very little reason to use USB (other than a reluctance to open your PC or a lack of free PCI slots).

 

Anyway, to answer your original question, there are many companies that manufacture USB networking kits: D-Link and Trust to name a couple. If you want to buy one of them, don't let me stop you.

 

PS. and yes I do know the difference between MB and Mb thank you.

[Christianb 8]

Okay I new I'd create a major argument over this one. As for the 40Mbps Watch a webcast. http://support.microsoft.com/default.asp...rb100801.asp.

 

Okay now about the NICs usually giving 95% throughput. I want you to actually run a test on your network you'll never get higher than 60% because of the way NICS work. I have a NIC Lan. I have switches and cables and NICs. I know what a lan is, I know they're cheap, I know they work, but they still are slower than hell for two, count them, two PC's. Do you know what Segue Silk Performer is? It's a web performance analysis tool. I've done network, website, intranet, database, webserver, e-commerce server, and a trillion other network performance tests professionally. How many have you done?

[Dirty Harry 0]

I'm sure you'll have lots of fun debating the theoretical speed of USB 1.0/1.1 and (the so far almost non-existent) USB 2.0 etc but, from practical experince I can assure you that Ethernet is many times faster than a USB cable. When I used a USB cable a year or so ago to transfer some files it was a LOT slower than my LAN. In practice I'd say I can transfer 100MB of files in perhaps 10-20 secs over my LAN today (haven't timed it, can do if you are interested). What I recall is that it took many minutes (5-10) to transfer larger directories (200-600 MB) with the USB thingy. Don't really feel like trying it out again though.

 

I still recommend anyone who has the need to connect two computers on a somewhat regular basis to go ethernet and install a LAN, which can do much more than the USB cable can. There is however one great potential use for the USB cable, say you have a corporate laptop w/o ethernet card (or you don't care to fiddle around with its network settings). Then the USB cable can come in really handy. Also, its easy to carry along together with the diskette. As long as the other PC doesn't run NT of course, which doesn't support USB.

 

H.

[Xiven 0]

Okay, time to put some very simple figures into this. With a 100Mb/s NIC I get a sustained transfer rate of 6MB/s.

 

6 * 8 = 48Mb/s

 

Now tell me (using your great networking experience), is 48Mb/s faster or slower than 40Mb/s? (this is of course assuming that USB can support a sustained throughput of 40Mb/s which it clearly cannot - the 40Mb/s is peak and will never be achieved in any real world situations - just the same as ethernet).

 

I never wanted to bring this down to a pointless debate, but such is life. Your point about 40Mb/s USB is accepted. Well done. I was wrong on that. I shall sit in the corner with a dunce's hat now.

[Christianb 8]

NICs communicate very slowly, they have to send things out in packets that get routed, and it's all designed to work well when there's a ton of computers on a network. And it does work well, even when there isn't a ton of computers. The problem with Nics on AND ONLY ON a single machine system is that NICs spend a large portion of their time figuring out which machine to send the packet to (MAC Addressing), what IP that system has (TCP/IP Protocol), what priority the data packet has (also TCP/IP). While with USB it just sends the freaking data already no who, where, and what priority. I guarantee you you'll get faster pings with USB, which for my purposes is what I'm looking for as it's to improve web browsing.

[Dirty Harry 0]

Quote:

... you'll get faster pings with USB, which for my purposes is what I'm looking for as it's to improve web browsing.

Look now Christianb,
unless somebody puts me in the same corner with Xiven there are no USB cable solutions that lets you do web browsing. This was about how to use the USB ports to network two PCs, and you can't. You can connect them for file transfer, yes, but network them, no.

All the nice theories discussed here are just theories, a USB connection, (that still only does file transfer) is in practice a lot slower than an ethernet one. Believe me, I've tried them both, and on more than one occasion, altough its some time ago I needed to toy with the USB. If you want to improve your web browsing, get a faster connection to the backbone. Or go optical, 1000Mb/s NICs or whatever. There is no way your Ethernet LAN is going to be the bottleneck when you are Web browsing with two PCs.

H.

[Xiven 0]

Quote:

NICs communicate very slowly, they have to send things out in packets that get routed, and it's all designed to work well when there's a ton of computers on a network. And it does work well, even when there isn't a ton of computers. The problem with Nics on AND ONLY ON a single machine system is that NICs spend a large portion of their time figuring out which machine to send the packet to (MAC Addressing), what IP that system has (TCP/IP Protocol), what priority the data packet has (also TCP/IP). While with USB it just sends the freaking data already no who, where, and what priority. I guarantee you you'll get faster pings with USB, which for my purposes is what I'm looking for as it's to improve web browsing.

If you're talking about latency rather than bandwidth then I wish you'd told me that earlier! I agree that quite probably USB has lower latency than ethernet. The bandwidth of the port is not a concern when dealing with latency.

[Christianb 8]

.

[Christianb 8]

I didn't even say I was sure I was going to do this. My article is just titled "Has anyone done USB Networking in Win2K". Actually I think USB networking would be most useful for backing up somebody's lap top that didn't have a NIC, but even then you can just throw a nic in it. I think I will try a firewire network though, with a Creative Audigy at some point, but I'm in no hurry 10/100 works fine for now. And I'll wait for Creative Audigy's drivers to stabilize. Since it's bleading edge technology right now.