The third major incarnation of the Universal Serial Bus is starting to arrive on the high street. USB is the name of the connector/cable/interface most commonly used to connect external equipment to your computer or laptop – most phones, printers, cameras, scanners, webcams, mice, keyboards, external hard drives, flash disks etc now connect using “USB”.
Your existing equipment will almost certainly be USB 2.0. So if you’re buying a new laptop or camcorder what do you need to know about USB 3.0?
1. It’s faster! A lot faster. Theoretical maximum speeds are something like :-
USB 1.0 – 1996 – 12 Mbit/s
USB 2.0 – 2000 – 480 Mbit/s
USB 3.0 – 2008 – 4.8 Gbit/s
So – theoretically it’s ten times faster than USB 2.0. Of course we won’t get anywhere near the theoretical speed but nonetheless it’s a lot faster. Much faster than both Firewire (800Mbit/s) – and eSata.
This is great if you’re attaching an external hard drive – or an HD digital camcorder and need to move a lot of data to or from your PC quickly.
2. The cable is thicker and the connectors are blue!
There are six wires in a USB 3.0 cable so cables are thicker. The connectors look similar though and by convention are coloured blue so you can tell them apart. Clever Eh?
3. It’s backward compatible – sort of!
a. You can use old style USB 2.0 cables with new USB 3.0 devices – but they’ll only work at the slower speed.
b. You can plug new USB 3.0 devices & cables into old USB 2.0 style PC ports – but again they’ll work at the slower speed.
c. You cannot plug a new USB 3.0 cable into an old USB 2.0 device as the connector at the device end (B end) is a different size.
4. It can provide more power.
USB is widely used for charging stuff as well as connecting to a computer. Very handy and reduces the number of chargers / power supplies to carry around.
USB 3.0 can provide almost twice as much power as USB 2.0.
Filed under: Computers, Technology, USB, USB 3.0
