Sunday, February 14, 2010

USB 3.0 - ready in 2011?

From Techrepublic.com

After a long wait USB 3.0 will finally be available soon via ASUS and Gigabyte motherboards. That’s all fine and dandy, but the new spec likely won’t be widely adopted until 2011. Why is that!? Well, Intel has announced that it will not include USB 3.0 in its chipsets until 2011. AMD may also follow suit.

What’s so great about USB 3.0 anyway?

Speed silly. USB 3.0 is more than 10 times faster than USB 2.0 is (theoretically anyhow). There are four distinct data rates (not to be confused with the four USB specifications) and each new one is backwards compatible.

1) Low Speed = .1875 MB/s (USB 1.0, USB 1.1)
2) Full Speed = 1.5 MB/s (USB 1.0, USB 1.1)
3) High Speed = 60 MB/s (USB 2.0)
4) Super Speed = 625 MB/s (USB 3.0)

Actual data throughput is usually much less than the maximum advertised USB specification and is a function of many variables, including overhead. Actual throughput in practice is typically up to 35 – 40MB/sec for USB 2.0 and may exceed 400MB/sec for USB 3.0. That’s pretty darn impressive for those of us with external hard drives.

read the entire article.

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