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Many of you or probably all of you have used a “usb 2.0″ device or you’ve heard “usb 2.0″ compatible related to printers, cameras, external hard drives and much more. USB is a wired interface that allows you to connect your computer to an external device for data transfer. The “2.0″ in “USB 2.0″ refers to the upgraded speed from the original USB 1.1 of the olden days. USB 2 has a max transfer rate of about 30 mega-bytes per seconds max. This means if you take listing pictures that are 1 mega-byte in size and you transfer 60 listing pictures from your camera to your computer it will take 2 seconds. 2 seconds is the speed based off the max transfer rate of USB 2, but in reality there are always bottle necks that take USB 2 down to about 10-15 mega-bytes per second. Don’t get me wrong USB 2 was fast enough for most anything the average computer user was doing, but with the bottle necks involved put a restraint on how far the hardware industry could go with new “toys”. It’s the same thing that happened with the internet. Until recently not everyone had a broadband connection so not everyone felt comfortable using streaming video or flash applications on their websites because they were afraid some people wouldn’t be able to see them. Now that (almost) everyone has a broadband connection those bottle necks are gone and streaming video & flash apps are all over the net.

Now enter the new USB 3.0! Transferring data at a MASSIVE 500 mega-bytes per second max. The new USB 3 technology can transfer data almost 17 times faster than the USB 2 everyone is using right now. What does this mean to you? This means we can get rid of a lot of bottle necks that we’re holding the industry back. Let’s take for example, hard drives. As of right now all commercially available hard drives can transfer data at around 80 mega-bytes per second max no matter what cable they’re using. **NERD COMMENT** Even if you’re using the newer SATA (300 mb/s) cables in your machine and running a RAPTOR HD, you’re not going much over 80mb/s **END NERD COMMENT** Hard drives can’t transfer data at speeds over 80 mega-bytes per second mainly because there was no interface that could support anything greater. Now that USB 3 is here hard drive manufactures can start to build hard drives that transfer data at rates of 300-500 mega-bytes per second. Another note is what they can now do with solid state flash storage. Flash storage transfers at around a snails speed (even in the mac air), but now that they have USB 3 to interface with we may see solid state flash drives reach speeds of 250-300 mega-bytes per second!

To put it in perspective, with this new USB 3 technology at max speed you’ll be able to copy an entire DVD movie from your hard drive to an external storage device in about 4 seconds. WOW!

I know this was a nerd post but thanks for reading along.
Matt Rains
www.RETechSeminars.com