USB 3.0
With through put up to 10 times faster than USB 2.0 and improved power management that results in longer battery life, USB 3.0 introduces compelling reasons to improve the world’s most popular PC interface. By 2015, all new PCs are expected to offer USB 3.0 ports, and over 2 billion new "Super Speed" USB devices will be sold in that year alone. The decision to invest in USB 3.0 was an easy one to make, but doing so without compromising the existing USB ecosystem was a big challenge to overcome. Our design had to follow the revised 3.0 specification precisely in order to enable emerging USB 3.0 hardware. There are also billions of older USB devices that Windows must remain compatible with.
In 1996 the first USB specification, which defined two speeds for USB devices: low speed with 1.5 Mbps and full speed with 12 Mbps were released. In 2000, the USB 2.0 specification came to light with a new, high speed 480 Mbps. High speed devices worked with all controllers, but low and full speed devices could not work with USB 2.0 controllers.
In 2008 the USB Standards organization released the new USB 3.0 specification, which included a new host controller and defined the new “Super Speed” USB device which is 5 Gbps. Together, the controller and device could operate at theoretical speeds of up to 10 times faster than USB 2.0. With this new standard, you’d a high definition movie copied from a USB storage drive in about 80 seconds instead of the 15 minutes it takes with USB 2.0. The specification also introduced a new transfer type / streams, which allows the storage drives to process the reads and writes more efficiently.
The new specification provided 80% more power than USB 2.0. This meant faster charging and removed the need for odd “Y” cables used by external DVD drives and other high power devices. But charging isn’t the only power consideration. With mobile computing, people want PCs that conserve battery life. By also introducing new low power states, finishing tasks more quickly, and powering down at every opportunity, USB 3.0 is more power efficient than its predecessors. This translates to longer battery life for notebooks and less power consumption for desktops.
Most importantly, the specification promises to enable a new generation of USB while maintaining compatibility with full, low, and high speed devices. Even the plugs are backwards compatible.