USB 3.0 premiers at CES
USB 3.0 is ready for prime time, as witness a demonstration of the new version of the protocol at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, running on a Hewlett-Packard. And it is indeed fast.
Jeff Ravencraft, president of the USB Implementers Forum, was in command of the USB 3.0 H-P demo, but plenty of other manufacturers had the new standard on new hardware as well. ASUS and Acer had new USB 3.0-capable hardware at the CES show, in addition to the Envy 15 laptop used for the demo. Ravencroft said, during his presentation, “This uses one-third of the power it would take on USB 2.0. And it’s backward compatible.”
ASUS displayed a sign at their booth at CES comparing the transfer speeds of USB 2.0 and 3.0. In their example, the 2.0 port took 2 minutes and 7 seconds to perform a transfer from a computer to an external hard disk. That same transfer was completed using the 3.0 protocol in just 1 minute 4 seconds. That would be an improvement from 127 seconds to 64 seconds, all but twice as fast. Especially given the massive amounts of data on hard drives today, that translates into backup times of half of what users are used to, a welcome change. The exact speed of transfer depend heavily on the type of device being written to.
There are at least 17 USB-certified products at CES, according to a story in PCWorld. The potential is thought to be an an order of magnitude (480Mbps against up to 5Gbps) faster using the new SuperSpeed incarnation of USB, although that sort of speed increase has not yet been demonstrated. The new USB standard is expected to be widely supported immediately. Manufacturers in all tech areas either have new products ready to sell or have those products on the drawing board. In the world of technology, nothing sells like speed. With an increase as big as this one, adoption of the new USB standard will be faster than you can say Moore’s Law.
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