USB 3 is now available everywhere. Because USB connections to external hard disk drives for backup are pretty typical, this offers a huge enhancement in speeding up the transfer. However as usual, you'll find a few caveats for getting on the cutting edge of technology. The USB 3 seemed to be a big hit at the CES exhibit in January of this year.

USB 2 provides a speed rating of 480 mBits/s, which implies about 57 megabytes per second. But those tend to be magical numbers considering that most users are lucky to obtain 25 megabytes per second and even that may be based mostly on file size. The new USB 3 is ranked at 4.8 Gbit/s or 570 megabytes a second but that also is far beyond the true speeds we got in the course of testing. Yet again it's rather based on file size and kind but we did manage to hit 58 megabytes per second in a handful of tests.

So in the actual world our testing showed at the very least a doubling of speed and usually half the time period to copy the same amount of data. In some instances where there were plenty of larger files (1 GB or above) we did obtain bursts of above 80 megabytes a second but that was the exception to the average copy rate. But I'll take a 50% boost in speed and usually a third of the time to backup files just about any day of the week.

Moving large and dense files like graphics or music will get a very major enhancement. Video cameras and music devices will receive a major enhancement in moving files to a personal computer. Server class machines and big workstations created for AutoCad, video editing, and music will certainly get a significant increase from the brand new USB 3 speeds.

Moving my audio collection around has always been a substantial pain. I have around 55 GBs of music and waiting for it to backup is intolerable. Or undertaking a total fresh back up of my main workstation with over 120 GBs may be about as much fun as watching paint dry. In testing the brand new USB 3 I obtained a huge enhancement over both jobs and lowered the time well over two thirds which is a significant improvement.

Now for the not so great news concerning USB 3: they changed the connector part that goes towards the device thus all your existing USB 2 devices will never see the brand new speeds. And as far as I could find at this time, you'll find only a handful of flash drives and external hard disk drives which are fully USB 3 compliant. And this also implies you'll need the brand new USB 3 cable to hook up with any new device.

A particular difficulty with recent and older motherboards is that they may be restricted by their bus interface data transfer rates. The PCI Generation 1.0 is restricted to 2.5 GB transfer rate so it does not make any difference how quick any connection is past that limit. And the new norm for USB 3 is a minimum of a 5 GB transfer rate to be authorized. You'll see an improvement in rate but in no way achieve the maximum transfer rate with these older designs.

And you won't notice USB 3 supplied in many new personal computers yet. You'll find a few of forward thinking businesses like Startech who sell a PCI board having USB 3 connections for about $50. And a few personal computer companies are gradually adding USB 3 to their latest computer versions. This is especially important for laptop computer users since the single method now to upgrade is to use a media card adapter.

Both HP and Fujitsu publicized that they will be supplying USB 3 on their new laptop computers. Western Digital was the very first out of the gate with a new model of My Book 3.0 external hard disk drive that also is available with a USB 3 PCI adapter in a package offer. Seagate has indicated it will offer you similar external hard drives by middle of the summer 2010. And flash drive producer Super Talent is offering a 16 GB flash drive that is definitely USB 3 compliant.

So in case you wish to speed up your file and data transfers, USB 3 will undoubtedly provide some real world enhancements in transfer rate. And when the new computer systems catch up and offer you USB 3, and most of the device manufacturers get the new USB 3 compliant designs in the supply line, it'll rapidly become the new standard.

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