SON SON
When you are in front of your PC, waiting for something to transfer to removable media, seconds can feel like minutes and minutes like hours, and backups to USB 2.0 appear to crawl along at snail’s pace, so much so that users often become reluctant to perform that essential chore, such data transfer scenario are where the new super speed USB 3.0 standard and its theoretical.
Blazing fast throughput as promised by the USB implementers forum (USB IF) will change your life for better, and if our test of four new USB 3.0 hard drives from Buffalo technology, Lomega, Seagate and Western Digital are indicative, the change will certainly be dramatic.
USB 3.0’s impressive speed is it raison d’etre, but part of its beauty is its backward compatibility with UBS 2.0. You need a new cable and new host adapter or one the new motherboard builds to support USB 3.0 to achieve USB 3.0 performance. But you still can use a USB 3.0 on a USB 2.0 port and achieve typical USB 2.0 performance, you may also use USB 2.0 devices on USB 3.0 port though, again with no gain in speed the technology behind USB 3.0 more closely resembles PCI express than USB 2.0 backward compatibility comes from clever connector design and a dual bus.
The designers added four data lines and a ground wire for the new USB 3.0 signals, and retained the existing pair of data lines for use with USB 2.0 devices, the two technologies share the existing power and ground wires, but they are otherwise completely separated. As such the USB 3.0 connector has design changes to accommodate the extra data lines, if you examine the inside of a type A USB 3.0 port with its familiar rectangular shape closely, you’ll see that is shares the same size as a USB 2.0 port as well as the original four USB 1.1/2.0 contacts.
However, the port also has an additional five smaller contacts for the new USB 3.0 lines, when you plug in a 2.0 connector, it uses the four original contacts; when you plug in a USB 3.0 connector, it taps into the other five, because motherboards and PCs will ship with both USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 ports, their insulting plastic, by specification to distinguish them must be bright blue on USB 3.0 port, but black on USB 2.0 ports.
Similar tricks have been used for the type B and mini connectors another potential benefit of USB 3.0; the spec calls for a more one-third of the power consumption USB 2.0 uses, the creators achieved that by reducing some of the background maintenance requirement of USB; unlike before with USB 3.0 the interface transmits data only to the link and device that need that info, which allows other attached devices to go into a low power state when not needed.
The change applies only to the USB bus not to the power that USB peripheral require or use for their own operation – although getting things done faster ultimately means using less power as well. The USB 3.0 revolution is coming, as many super speed USB 3.0 certified products are now shipping, including host controllers, adapter cards, motherboards from ASUS, Gigabyte, Intel and other , but it won’t be an immediate switch, according to In-Stat research, it will be 2013 when more than one quarter of USB products support super speed USB 3.0.
The slow transition isn’t particularly surprising, considering that no compatible peripheral or consumer electronics devices have even been announced so far, some devices, such as keyboards and mice, won’t benefit from superspeed USB’s increased performance, other products such as digital cameras and camcorders.
The theoretical improvement in throughput that USB 3.0 offers is certainly dramatic a 10X jump to 5 gbps over the existing USB 2.0 spec, which maxed out at a theoretical 480 mbps, but how does USB 3.0 fare in the real world?, pretty darn well, it turns out.