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WHAT ABOUT USB 3 (a/k/a/ USB Superspeed)?
It’s already been approved for 2 years, but AMD, Intel & Microsoft haven’t bothered to release a 3.0 chipset for their motherboards. Maybe in the 1st Win7 Service Pack Microsoft will release software support. They’ll have to, as the devices are already rolling out. (If you have a problem, get a USB3 card for your machine, with appropriate driver.)
The cables will be slightly thicker, due to a fifth internal wire [in/out data transfer, power + grounding], and will have a different connector, but will be completely backward compatible with USB 1 & 2. The new bi-directional wire and pin configuration makes USB3 faster because now data can be read and written over the connection at the same time, while the older USB standards could only allow data transfer in one direction.
All of this means that data transfer speeds will be up to 10 times faster than USB2 devices, so you can transfer MP3s, movies, data at 10x speeds.
Moreover, the thicker cable will allow quicker power charging for your cell phones, MP3 players, digital cameras and the like, as the power output will be increased from about 100 milliamps to 900 milliamps. Further, USB3 abandons “device polling” in favor or a new “interrupt-driven” protocol, which means that non-active or idle devices not currently being charged by a USB3 port will no longer have their power drained by the host controller as it looks for active data traffic. Now, the devices will send a signal to the host to begin the data transfer.
Of course, to take advantage of the new technology, you must connect to devices that are capable of using the increased speed. Your hard drive will still be limited by its RPMs, media devices may be limited, and flash drives will have to be built to take advantage of the higher speeds. And you’ll need new USB hubs, but they’ll handily charge four devices faster and better than the old hubs. This’ll all take a while. But ten times faster is a huge change!
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