USB 3.0

21. November 2008 by David Peterson.

It wasn’t all that long ago that I wrote an article comparing USB 2.0 vs. Firewire. Just for prosperity sake I’m going to leave that article up, you can see it here at our parent company JDP Digital, Inc

Hot off the press Computerworld.com reports (November 17, 2008) that the standard for the new USB 3.0 has been set. These new units will be able to reach theoretical transfer speeds of 5Gbits/sec. That is 10 times faster than our current 2.0 speeds which were set at 480Mbits/secs. We are now talking about Giga bits vs. Mega bits.

What does that mean for you the end user? 10 times the transfer speed means that 1GB of data can be transferred in just over 3 seconds. It takes 33 seconds for a 2.0 device to transfer that amount of data.  Here is how the website MaximumPC.com states it… “The example Intel likes to give out when talking about the new speed is that transferring a 27GB HD movie to your future media player will only take 70 seconds with USB 3.0, while it would take 15 minutes or more with 2.0.”

Look for the new devices in 2010 but there is a small hurdle that has to be crossed. Our current operating systems don’t know what to do with 3.0. There has to be new software developed and implemented for our operating systems to move forward. Microsoft among others is already ahead of this problem.

Our USB Flash Memory retail store currently sells 2.0 1GB USB flash memory for around $7.50/unit. I bet in 2010 the same unit will sell, if you can even buy them, for around $0.99/unit. I still chuckle, back in 2002 a 1.0, 512MB unit was selling for $375.00 – got to love technology.

Posted in Drive Speeds | No Comments »