USB 3.0 External HDD with Wireless

[wrugoin]

Hello All,

I had intended to purchase an external USB 3.0 hard drive for my main PC in my home office. The home office is only networked wirelessly. No network cables are used. My main PC and some devices use the 5GHz band, however some (Wife's Laptop, iPhones, wireless printer) are on the 2.4GHz band.

When talking to a rep at my local hardware store (Fry's Electronics) he told me that a USB 3.0 drive may interfere with any 2.4GHz wireless devices in the room. I didn't purchase the drive because of that comment. A little bit of googling when I got home has confirmed the rep was correct and this may be an issue for me.

My question is does anyone here at SmallNetBuilder have personal experience with this issue?
Has USB 3.0 messed with your wireless?
Have you found solutions?
Based on the setup I listed above, would the drive cause issues with the laptop, iPhone and printer?

Any help and personal experiences would be appreciated. Thanks!

 

[stevech]

Hello All,

I had intended to purchase an external USB 3.0 hard drive for my main PC in my home office. The home office is only networked wirelessly. No network cables are used. My main PC and some devices use the 5GHz band, however some (Wife's Laptop, iPhones, wireless printer) are on the 2.4GHz band.

When talking to a rep at my local hardware store (Fry's Electronics) he told me that a USB 3.0 drive may interfere with any 2.4GHz wireless devices in the room. I didn't purchase the drive because of that comment. A little bit of googling when I got home has confirmed the rep was correct and this may be an issue for me.

My question is does anyone here at SmallNetBuilder have personal experience with this issue?
Has USB 3.0 messed with your wireless?
Have you found solutions?
Based on the setup I listed above, would the drive cause issues with the laptop, iPhone and printer?

Any help and personal experiences would be appreciated. Thanks!

I have USB3 in my PC and in my NAS. No issues.

It's a big stretch to say that RF signal leakage from the USB3 cable will produce lots of sustained signals in the 2.4GHz band.
In any RF system, like WiFi, the radio (in the WiFi router or laptop) should not be placed very close to certain kinds of RF sources. Such as a microwave oven. Or a WiFi router 2 ft. from a Laptop using WiFi. The latter is not due to interference, but due to overloading the receiving device with a too-strong signal. USB2 would have the same problem, perhaps less so due to lower frequency, but not necessarily so - because it's about the cable shielding.

One simple test I did (just one data point)...
USB3 Seagate drive/enclosure.
USB3 cable to Synology NAS 2 ft. away.
Android smartphone (HTC one) using WiFi, 3 ft. from USB drive, 4 ft. from WiFi access point (all in my home office).
Started a backup from NAS to USB3 external drive - heavy data load.

Ran speedTest.net on my Android phone, to my usual server that I test with.
Several tests.

All show the same speed I normally see (20Mbps down, 1Mbps up from TimeWarner cable).

I can imagine a case where the client is in a weak WiFi signal area and a weak USB3 related signal leaks from a too-cheap USB3 cable (poor shielding). Another case might be a cheap laptop with a leaky USB3 port and a cheap USB3 cable to a disk. And laptop has a weak WiFi signal.
The FCC in the US, and most other civilized countries, have regulations on how much RF a cable intended for residential can radiate (leak). No doubt, lots of Asian manufacturers don't feel compelled to meet such standards.
Intel and others have papers on this topic but they don't state it's a serious problem.

Most unlikely the USB3 cable leaks enough RF to affect WiFi.

 

[wrugoin]

Thanks for the feedback. Just for anyone reading this, the online information I was referencing came from http://www.intel.com/content/www/us...al-bus/usb3-frequency-interference-paper.html

It's nice to see you had little to no disruption with your wireless network when doing a file transfer over USB 3.0.