USB 3.0 Finally Arrives ......

the world's best known computer peripheral interface "USB" came back with a major revamp !!

USB 3.0 aka SuperSpeed USB


improvement:

The theoretical throughput improvement offered by USB 3.0 is dramatic -- a theoretical 10X jump over existing USB 2.0 hardware. USB 2.0 maxed out at a theoretical 480Mbps, while USB 3.0 can theoretically handle up to 5Gbps*.

* note that:
the really maximum throughput for USB 2.0 could never goes close to 480Mbps, but it make data transfer at around 320 Mbps
and similarly for USB 3.0 it will never reach to 5 Gbps but the point is even half of this data rate will achieve almost 10x faster from USB 2.0

as PCWorld said:
The beauty of USB 3.0 is its backward compatibility with USB 2.0
you need a new cable and new host adapter (or, one of the motherboards that supports USB 3.0) to achieve USB 3.0, but you can still use the device on a USB 2.0 port and achieve typical USB 2.0 performance.

* Mbps "Mega Bit per Second" = 1/8 Mega Byte per second
so to convert 320 Mbps to M bytes per second 320/8 = 40 Mbyte per second

so with USB 3.0 the excepected data rate is 2.5 Gbps = 2.5/8 GByte per second = 312.5 MByte per second

312/40 ~= 8x faster !!

the max rate i achieved i think about 20 - 25 Mbyte per second



resources:
PCWorld

Melissa J. Perenson, PC World

Jan 11, 2010 6:57 am