Universal Serial Bus (USB) medium came a very much long way facilitating us with the amazing speeds of its times. USB continues to amaze as its coming out with its new high speed versions in every age. Now USB 3.0 is on the way to your computers and you will be using it soon. Before we go into the details of features of USB 3.0 lets go back to times when USB was first introduced and look on how its evolved.
Back in 1996 companies like Intel, Microsoft and Compaq introduced and started giving support for this medium. The first version USB 1.0 provided the abilities like connecting the devices to computer without restarting it and also using same one port for power and data with a number of pin connectors in there. Soon in 1998 a new version was introduced and this was referred as USB 1.1
USB 1.1 came with amazing transfer speed of its time and that was 12 Mbps. It served the purpose for a while and served it well. Along with advancement of USB, the USB storage devices were also soon introduced. The most significant in this respect is the arrival of USB Flash drives. They rocked the removable storage media and was a tremendous improvement over the floppy drives which were just holding at most 2 MB of data were really a pain.
Soon a version called USB 2.0 was introduced, this was also a huge improvement over its earlier versions. USB 2.0 is the most recent in use version and supports the transfer rates of about 480 Mbps. USB 2.0 and all the earlier versions support one way data transfer at a time.
USB 3.0 which have been talked from last two years now soon coming into your computers. USB 3.0 is a tremendous transfer rate improvement and supports 3.2Gbps data transfer rate. Not only that, it supports the two way data transfer. A device connected via USB 3.0 can not only transmit to computer but also can get data at a time. To support the two way data transfer USB 3.0 comes with the extra pins in the connectors.
The extra pins are setup in a way that when a USB 3.0 device is connected to a connector of USB 2.0 or earlier versions the extra pins don’t come in contact with any of the other pins. Carefully setup interface of USB 3.0 enables USB 3.0 devices to connect and function with older versions of USB ports but yes in that case data transfer will be one way due to absence of ability to use the two extra introduced connections.
About till 2011 you will start seeing the devices from Intel using this technology and several motherboard manufacturers have also started planning the board models which will provide the USB 3.0 devices.
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