More USB 3.0 details emerged

Every­body knows that intel is work­ing on USB 3.0 spe­cific­a­tion and it released it recently. When USB 2.0 emerged it increased the band­width of USB 1.1 from 12Mbps to 480Mbps. But this time the USB 3.0 is upping the band­width to 10x mak­ing it to 4.8Gbps. The max­im­umpc is dug­gup some details about the spe­cific­a­tions that is what we are going to discuss.

The key points are

USB 3.0 will be back­wards-com­pat­ible with USB 2.0

Like the USB 2.0 is back­word com­pat­ible to USB 1.1, the new USB 3.0 is also back­ward com­pat­ible to USB 2.0 allow­ing us to use the USB 3.0 devices to work with the exist­ing but with reduced capa­cit­ies. You are not able to use it full poten­tial untill you use USB 3.0 cable with super­speed devices and ports, but at least plug­ging a 3.0 cable into a 2.0 port won?t blow up your PC. The spe­cific­a­tions com­pat­ib­il­ity lies in the design of the new con­nect­ors. USB 2.0 cables worked of four lines ? a pair for data trans­fer, one for power, and the last for ground. USB 3.0 adds five new lines, but the new con­tacts sit par­al­lel to the old ones on a dif­fer­ent plane, as opposed to being adja­cent to them. This means you?ll be able to dif­fer­en­ti­ate between 2.0 and 3.0 cables just by look­ing at the ends.

The max­im­um speed of USB 3.0 is 4.8Gbps
USB 3.0 will be 10x faster than the 480Mbps lim­it of the USB 2.0. The example Intel give out when talk­ing about the new speed is that trans­fer­ring a 27GB HD movie to your USB 3.0 device will only take 70 seconds with USB 3.0, while it would take 15 minutes or more with 2.0. Keep in mind that you?re only going to be able to take advant­age of this speed if your port­able stor­age device can write data that quickly. Sol­id state devices will bene­fit most from the speed boost, while mag­net­ic HDDs will be lim­ited by their RPM and its read/​write speeds. Also, new Mass Stor­age Device drivers will have to be developed for Win­dows to take advant­age of the specifications.

Uploads and down­loads are kept on sep­ar­ate data lanes

To achive 4.8Gbps added five new data lanes to the exist­ing four lanes to sep­ar­ate the upload and down­loads on dif­fer­ent lanes. With USB 3.0, two new lanes will be ded­ic­ated to trans­mit data, while anoth­er pair will handle receiv­ing data. This not only accounts for the sig­ni­fic­ant speed boost, but also allows USB 3.0 to both read and write at the same time from your port­able stor­age device. Pre­vi­ously with USB 2.0 it was like it works uni dir­ec­tion­al at time. This bid­irec­tion­al trans­fers allow us to back up to stor­age devices to do faster and effi­cient transfers.

USB 3.0 will charge more devices, quicker

USB 3.0, as increased speeds, it also car­ries more power as com­pared to USB 2.0. The old specs uses 100 mil­li­amps is bumped to 900 mil­li­amps. facil­it­at­ing us to charge more devices on single hub.

USB 3.0 will be more power efficient 

The best of new spec is more effi­cient power-usage pro­to­cols. USB 3.0 aban­dons device polling in favor of a new inter­rupt-driv­en pro­tocol, which means non-act­ive or idle devices (which aren?t being charged by the USB port) won?t have their power drained by the host con­trol­ler as it looks for act­ive data traffic. Instead, the devices will send the host a sig­nal to begin data trans­fer. This fea­ture will also be back­ward com­pat­ible with USB 2.0 cer­ti­fied devices.

Read more –> Everything You Need to Know About USB 3.0, Plus First Spliced Cable Photos