At CES there were more than 17 certified USB 3.0 products and dozens of announcements. 2010 is the year when it will finally roll out en masse to retail products. If you’re skeptical about USB 3.0, I can’t blame you; there has been more mystification than elucidation on the topic.

USB stands for Universal Serial Bus and it can connect peripheral devices such as mice, keyboards, and printers with a host computer without having to switch off the computer first. Over the last ten years USB has become mainstream and it’s gone through two main generations—USB 1.1 and USB 2.0. The USB 1.1 configuration debuted in 1998, offering a maximum transfer rate of 12Mbit/s. This was followed by the 480Mbit/s data transfer speed with the Hi-Speed USB 2.0 spec launched in 2000. Although the USB 3.0 specs were officially unveiled in August 2008, this is the first year we’ve seen any real adoption of the technology.

It’s fast

Data transfers now involve hi-definition content, hard drives offering terabytes of storage, mobile phones with a gigabytes of data, peripherals devices like digital cameras with large file sozes, iPods, phones, consoles and portable media players. Theoretically, USB 3.0 is capable of 5Gbit/s. In reality, it seems to deliver only 50% of that maximum speed but even that is a tenfold improvement on the USB 2.0 standard. 

In USB 3.0 standard there is an added physical bus parallel to the existing USB 2.0 bus. Therefore, USB 3.0 cables have 4 more wires, in addition to the 5 wires of the USB 2.0 standard, eight for carrying data and one for ground. The advantage of nine wires is that they provide two extra corridors to transfer data back and forth between the computer and peripherals. This not only increases the data transfer rates it also means there will be less chance of data transfers clogging up.

Unlike the earlier versions of USB which support data transfer in only one direction, USB 3.0 can simultaneously transfer data bi-directionally from computers to peripherals and vice versa. There are now two dedicated extra lanes compared to the USB 2.0 standard, to read and write data at the same time without slowing down the data transfer rate. 

One of the most valuable features of USB 3.0 cables are their backward compatibility with USB 2.0. A new cable and host controller is needed to achieve the new speed and performance of USB 3.0 technology, but you can still use a USB 3.0 compatible device on a USB 2.0 port. Although, it will not offer the performance of the USB 3.0 standard, it can actually support the power efficiency of the USB 3.0 standard. 

USB 3.0 ports support superior power efficiency, and it can also provide more power to power hungry devices simultaneously. USB 3.0 provides 150mA of electricity, which is 50% more than the USB 2.0 standard, and therefore USB powered mobile phones will charge much faster and deliver enough power to support camcorders, external hard drives and multiple monitors. USB 3.0 is also marter with high level power management software that draws less power when the computer or devices are in idle mode. 

There are some surplus advantages of USB 3.0 too, such as support for asynchronous and isochronous transfers. USB 2.0 supports synchronous transfers, where the host controller has to request the data each time to drive it into the USB device. However, USB 3.0 supports streamlined asynchronous transfers with much faster speeds. USB 3.0 also supports isochronous transfers, which allows device to switch to a low power state amid service intervals. During bulk transfers too, the performance of USB 3.0 is much better and more rapid. 

You can expect a horde of USB 3.0 enabled devices to hit the retail shelves this year. The amount of data people want to be able to transfer via USB continues to increase. Synchronization between multiple devices is also becoming quite common and therefore we need a faster technology like USB 3.0 to support our aggressive data needs. 

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