Available NOW : The Benefits of USB 3.0 On Windows
USB 3.0 SuperSpeed Accessories For Windows7 PC's
The USB 3.0 market is advancing fast n the Windows side of things: Gigabyte, MSI, ASUS etc. are shipping motherboards with USB 3.0 support, using NEC's SuperSpeed chipset. A growing demand for USB 3.0 peripherals
is flourishing.
USB3 Backwards Compatible With USB 1.1 & 2.0 Peripherals
USB 3.0 SuperSpeed can continue to work with your existing USB 2.0 and 1.1 computer accessories: Keyboards, mice, printers, backup hard drives, portable speakers, HD TV Tuner sticks, Digital Cameras - while bringing a new era of high-speed peripherals to the market.
New USB 3 SuperSpeed Cables, Hubs, Connectors and Adapters
Better. Faster. The new USB 3.0 specifications will have the same sized Type A cable connector as USB 1.1 and 2.0. At first glance the 'A' cable looks identical, but inside there are 5 additional pins that USB3 cables will detect to handle the higher signaling rates.
At the device end new 'B' size plugs as seen below will become common, as well as a new mini USB 3 plug standard for gizmos like digital cameras and other small form-factor devices.
Note The New Shape Of USB3 Device-End Connector
How Fast Is 3.0 Universal Serial Bus Technology?
The very first Universal Serial Bus spec 1.1 brough easy-to-connect peripheral standard to the masses. It was 12MB per second, which was fine for 'slow' devices like keyboards, mice and printers. But then along came USB 2.0 - at potentially 480MB per second, it was literally FOURTY TIMES FASTER - a huge leap forward.While still not optimized for HD camcorders and video (FireWire 400 - 800 has excelled at that) - USB 2.0 was important for far faster hard drive backups, flash-drives, high-resolution scanners and All-In-Ones. USB 2.0 was also important for video capture devices and HD TV tuners which demanded more bandwidth.
USB 3.0 will get even more elbow room with 4.8Gbps SuperSpeed - A TEN-FOLD leap! USB3 also has refinements for lower CPU utilization, reduced device polling, and smarter, better power management. USB3 also supports BIDIRECTIONAL data transfers - a significant advance over USB2's one-way, uni-directional model.
Why USB SuperSpeed - What Computer Gadgets NEED 4.8Gbps Bandwidth?
In 2010 and Beyond: USB 3 peripherals will again be up to 10x faster than USB 2.0 - A new generation of HD USB3 camcorders, High-Definiton USB 3.0 TV tuner sticks, as well as bandwidth hungry flash memory based SSD Disk Drives. Solid-State backup drives in particular will demand and make fantastic use of version 3.0 Super-Speed advantages. Faster syncing of next generation USB3 enabled handheld devices, iPods or iPhones will benefit as new models adopt this new interface standard.
PCI Cards and ExpressCard USB 3.0 Adapters
NEC Japan recently announced a USB 3.0 controller, backwards compatible with USB 1.1 and USB 2.0 due to arrive at retail mid to late year - supporting USB3.0 Superspeed (5Gbps) along with the older 480Mbps, 12Mbps, and the 1.5Mbps specifications.To get a good sense of the speed bump SuperSpeed USB will provide, NEC's press release compared the transfer a 25GB Blu-ray disc from disc to a computer hard drive: 70 second transfer with USB3.0 interface as compared to 14 minutes with USB 2.0 - Quite impressive! It's cards like these that will likely show up in Mac Pro Towers first.
ExpressCard 2.0 Spec To Support USB SuperSpeed
Current ExpressCard specs just couldn't support USB3's full bandwidth - it's current theoretcial bandwitdh is only 2.5Gbps. So in many ways, the next generation -- ExpressCard 2.0 -- had to wait for USB 3.0 specs to finalize before it's final architechture and needs could be spec'd out. It too will be backward compatible.It'll be interesting to see how this will play out on Windows (and eventually Mac) computers. Without SuperSpeed drivers in OSX Leopard, the future of USB 3 on the Mac is still unclear.
But in the meantime, the Windows7 market is getting interesting, and some people are already enjoying the benefits of SuperSpeed with PCI USB3 cards, USB 3 backup drives and more that are taking advantage of the USB3 drivers Windows7 now offers.
