Life without USB. Can you remember when USB was introduced? You can? Ahhh… well that’s pretty impressive. Well for those of you who don’t remember it was 14 years ago in 1996 when USB 1.0 was released. After some pretty impressive collaborative work between Compaq, Digital, IBM, Intel, Northern Telecom, and Microsoft the Universal Serial Bus* was developed. So that was some time ago… so what has happened since then?
*How did you not know that that was what USB stood for? Well now you do 
Well when initially introduced USB 1.0 had a transfer rate of 12 Mbps and did an excellent job of replacing the multitude of cables and ports at the back of PC’s as well as simplifying the software configuration of all devices configured to USB. But as file sizes and the need for bigger hard drives grow it is obvious that this is directly proportionate to the need for new data transfer systems. This resulted in the introduction of USB 2.0 in the year 2000.
USB 2.0 has been sufficient for users worldwide since then. USB 2.0 has a theoretical transfer speed of 480Mbps making it seriously faster than its predecessor (40x to be exact.) However, with today’s high-definition video content, terabyte storage devices, high megapixel count digital cameras, and multi-gigabyte mobile phones and portable media players, 480Mbps is just not really that fast anymore. So comes the big announcement of the Super Speed USB aka USB 3.
Basically USB 3.0 promises the following:
The beauty of USB 3.0 is its backward compatibility with USB 2.0. You will need a new cable and new host adapter (or, one of the Asus or Gigabyte motherboards that have USB 3.0 built in) 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. The improvement in speed offered by USB 3.0 is dramatic – theoretically 10x that of USB 2.0 hardware.
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