ctrl.altered.mind

The USB Implementers Forum is planning to announce the next generation of the ubiquitous Universal Serial Bus technology by mid 2008. USB 3.0 will allow a ten-fold increase in data transfer rates, by adding fiber-optic links alongside traditional copper wires in the bus - which would boost the specification to a theoretical 4.8 Gigabits per second (the current USB 2.0 version has a top data-transfer rate of 480 megabits per second).

Although not too many external peripherals would be able to make use of such bandwidth, the technology implies a completely different meaning for devices such as external hard drives and next-generation optical drives like Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. The data transfer rate of internal SATA hard drives today caps out at 3 Gbps, with most desktops and laptops using a lesser SATA version that allows only up to 300 Mbps. The prospect of an external hard drive having the ability to exceed transfer rates of today’s internal drives, is very promising - as transfer speeds are the only strong differential that separates the two categories of consumer hard drives today.

There is probably no need to hold off on that impending hard drive purchase just yet, as USB 3.0 products won’t be arriving in the marketplace before 2009 or 2010.

(via slashdot)

This entry was posted on Friday, September 21st, 2007 at 3:45 pm and is filed under Digital Lifestyles, Embedded Systems.