LaCie High-Speed Drive
Other than being excited about finding a site dedicated to all things USB, I found an interesting post suggesting that the new transfer protocol, while slated to max out at 4.8Gbps upon its release later this year, can ultimately support a transfer rate of 25Gbps with some rather minor adjustments. By comparison, the current speed king, eSATA (found primarily on high-end external hard drives like the 1TB LaCie drive pictured) tops out at 3.0Gbps.
“The protocol itself can support the speed of 25Gbps,” said Jeff Ravencraft, the chairman of the USB Implementers Forum, at a recent conference in Japan. “But we don’t know when USB 3.0 will reach that speed, of course.”
At the moment, eSATA is hampered by the inability to power connected devices and its effective cable limit of 2 meters, and many analysts see it as an interesting stopping point but pretty much a dead end. Firewire, once the darling of the video and photography industry, currently supports speeds of 800Mbps and consistently outperforms USB 2.0, but seems to actually losing ground as time goes by, with the media-friendly new Apple Macbooks in particular lacking a port. The gr0up behind FW, the 1394 Trade Association, has been developing a S3200 standard that promises speeds up to 3.2Gbps on standard Firewire 800 cables, but its popularity will depend largely on motherboard manufacturers, who have steadily gotten behind USB for quite some time now.
With literally billions of USB 2.0 devices in the marketplace, USB 3.0’s status as the natural successor is practically assured, and the fact that it has support for speeds that far exceed anything necessary on the market at this time means that it looks like it will stick around a while. While I like the fact that FireWire devices can be daisy-chained directly from one to another because of their streamlined circuitry, USB 3.0 is supposed to offer new power management and communication features that will no doubt make it a success.
More information about the upcoming 3.0 standard can be found here.
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