Day 12 – All Hail the mighty USB 3.0 port on the Surface Pro Windows 8 Tablet

Teaching and Learning with a Windows 8 Tablet

3/23/2013 

Welcome to Day 12 of working with a Microsoft Surface Pro Windows 8 tablet for educators. Today I will be discussing one of the greatest features a tablet device can have for school use, the mighty USB 3.0 port.

The Surface Pro features a USB 3.0 port, located on the left-hand side when holding the tablet in landscape mode. The USB port is a full-size port so there is no need to buy those silly little adapter cables that can never be found when you need them.

It is important to understand that there are different versions of USB when comparing features between different tablet models. Some tablets have no USB port at all. The Clover Trail Atom models of Windows 8 tablets that I am familiar with come with a USB 2.0 port. Some use a full-size port while others use a miniUSB or microUSB connection. I much prefer the full-size version of USB as it is one less adapter cable to buy and lose. The advantage of the mini/microUSB ports are that manufacturers can make devices thinner.

I am not sure if you can buy a Windows 8 tablet today without some version of USB.  I only have hands-on experience with the Samsung Ativ 500T Clover Trail model that has a full-size USB 2.0 port, and now the Surface Pro that comes with full-size USB 3.0 port. All I can say from experience is that I would not recommend a tablet for school use without the ability for easily moving files on and off the device. A USB port makes that workflow much easier and faster. Sharing is caring.

There are workarounds if you do not have a USB port on a tablet, but they are just that, workarounds. We are not quite ready to live 100 percent in the cloud so once again we are holding onto the old ways of doing things, like transferring files via USB. It may not be fashionable but it is definitely practical in a school environment.

I often work with large multimedia files. In the era of the flipped classroom having a way to easily share very large video files with colleagues and students is becoming more common.

Having the files hosted on YouTube or stored in a cloud storage solution is one option, but what happens when the students go home? Do they have broadband Internet access at home to watch videos? Some do of course but we are still living in the digital divide era that prevents many students from having access to the Internet at home. Don’t believe me? Checkout this map of broadband access for the county our university is located in.
 

http://www.broadbandillinois.org/Get-it/East-Central-Regional-eTeam/Broadband-Maps-Demographic-Analysis/Coles-County.html

We need to pause and realize the true cost of technology extends well beyond the device. Total costs will add up to much more than the initial purchase price, the creation and consumption of content is often excluded from consideration of the initial purchase. Adding an Internet requirement easily doubles the yearly costs of owning a device. Throw in additional protective cases, keyboards, covers, chargers, deployment software, wireless access, storage cards, sync carts, and apps and you can see the costs add up.

Having content available locally on the device is one way to eliminate some of the need for broadband requirements. Even in the wealthiest districts the cost of providing simultaneous bandwidth to hundreds or thousands of students concurrently is expensive. Off-loading some of the network bandwidth to the local devices is one method of decreasing costs. In addition, not having to wait for downloads over wireless connections makes for a much more pleasurable viewing experience.

To demonstrate the improvements of the Surface Pro tablet I copied a 1.87 GB video file from a USB 2.0 flash drive to the Surface Pro, I then copied the same file using a USB 3.0 drive to the Surface Pro.

Here are the results:

First, the USB 2.0 drive. I copied the 1.87 GB video file from a Transcend USB 2.0 flash drive using the USB 3.0 port of the Surface Pro. This is an important point because the USB 3.0 port of the Surface Pro is backward compatible to USB 2.0. Even though the Surface Pro supports USB 3.0 you must also be using a USB 3.0 drive to gain the speed advantages of the newer technology.

The average speed of the copy was about 17.4 MB/s. The total time for the copying was a little over 2 minutes. I have provided a screenshot of the copying in progress below.

Next up was a 1 Terrabyte Western Digital My Passport USB 3.0 drive that I connected to the USB 3.0 port of the Surface Pro. Yes, I know that this is a “spinning” drive compared to the solid state Transcend drive so this is not a “true” comparison in the academic sense. If anything it puts the WD drive at a huge disadvantage to the smaller 16GB solid state Transcend drive.

I copied the same 1.87 GB video file from the Western Digital USB 3.0 drive. This time the average speed of the copy was about 91.7 MB/s. The total time for the copying was under 15 seconds. Here is the USB 3.0 screenshot of the file copy in progress.
 

 

It would really be a disappointment if USB 2.0 was not compatible with USB 3.0 as we would have to buy all new USB 3.0 drives for the Surface Pro. Happily, USB 3.0 is backward compatible by design so we can still use the older USB 2.0 technology with the new, it will just be at the slower USB 2.0 speeds.

USB 3.0 offers 8 to 10 times faster copy times compared to USB 2.0. Think of it this way, if I could go to work for just one hour a day and work at USB 3.0 speeds I could get as much work done in that one hour as it would take me to do in 8 hours if I worked at USB 2.0 speeds. That’s a big difference!

Copying that 2GB video file locally just saved 2GB of traffic over the wireless network. Multiply that by 30 students and you just saved 60 GB of wireless network traffic. I hope your schools data plan is not capped at 5GB ;)  Bits are bits, it all adds up.

So the mundane USB 3.0 port is definitely a positive for the Surface Pro. I may not be the typical tablet user but I do appreciate the technical improvements that the Surface Pro has to offer. These technical improvements do increase the cost of the Surface Pro but as they say, you get what you pay for.

Choice is good.

Until next time...
Keep on Learning,

Tom Grissom, PhD

Follow me on Twitter @tomgrissom

Interested in Teaching and Learning with Technology?
http://www.eiu.edu/itc/

Please subscribe and listen to the TechTalk4Teachers Podcast:
http://techtalk4teachers.blogspot.com/