USB 3.0 specs announced

By Stewart Meagher
10:09 Nov 12, 2008 | 8 Comments
Tags: USB | 3.0 | specs | announced

Superspeed freed

THE USB Implementers Forum will formally announce the technical specifications of the next generation of Universal Serial Bus connectivity at a conference in San Jose, California, next week.

Despite a difficult birth – hampered by infighting and political shenanigans between the big players, including Intel, Nvidia and AMD – the new standard is expected to be something in the order of ten times faster than the current USB 2.0 specification.

Everything USB is reporting that a 25GB file can be transferred in just 70 seconds using the new system, compared to nearly 14 minutes for USB 2.0 and a pitifully slow (how did we ever cope?) 9.3 hours for 1.0.

That's 4.8Gb a second. Other improvements will include better power management and the use of optical cabling.

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8 Comments

Demonic Nov 12, 2008 10:33 AM	4.8Gb a second?? 25Gb in 70 seconds is 357Mb a second
shorty56au Nov 12, 2008 10:52 AM	Actually, no...4.8Gbps = 600MBps. Note the use of the lower case b's. Still pretty damn impressive, though we still need storage devices in our PCs that'll cope with speeds that quick. When they do though, I'll be one happy customer :D
SceptreCore Nov 12, 2008 11:51 AM	Well it's about bloody time... I hate slow USB devices This sounds good, hopefully can be seen on later revisions of boards and PCI cards ASAP.
LordBug Nov 12, 2008 1:58 PM	Great news, I look forwards to faster USB memory sticks which allow portable apps to run at a good clip, and for the general transfer speed to be more realistic as sizes keep on growing (How long until we have ~1TB sticks?)
ahsoka Nov 12, 2008 2:11 PM	Note to Demonic: shorty56au is right. This is because with lowecase 'b's it's bits, not bytes. And 1 byte = 8 bits. Anyway, with those sorts of speeds USB 3.0 is going to rock.
drago13666 Nov 13, 2008 12:02 AM	it would be nice if they upped the power ratings on it too so you don't need external power for external drives
bu14-1 Nov 13, 2008 8:43 AM	"it would be nice if they upped the power ratings on it too so you don't need external power for external drives" Yeah, that would be cool. I don't know how doable it is though.
antifunker Nov 16, 2008 10:42 AM	This is great news for pro external sound card users!

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