IT Crate Tutorial, Tips, Technology NewsWebsite Design and Development Company

The president of the USB Implementers Forum discussed the arrival of USB 3.0 and gave a brief demonstration of transfer speeds on a Hewlett-Packard laptop at the Consumer Electronics Show.

In case anyone was in doubt, USB 3.0 is a lot faster than the current 2.0 version. Below is a photo of a display Asus had at CES, showing a comparison of the time it takes to drag a 2.1GB file from a laptop to an external hard disk drive using USB 2.0 and USB 3.0. And in the second video segment, Jeff Ravencraft, president of the USB Implementers Forum, provides a taste of the gaping difference in transfer speeds between USB 2.0 and 3.0.

And another certainty: USB 3.0 is now available to consumers on laptops from HP and Asus, among others.

USB is also more power efficient than 2.0. “This uses one-third of the power it would take on USB 2.0,” said Ravencraft, in an interview at CES. “And it’s backward compatible,” he said, meaning it can also handle peripherals that use older USB standards.

And speaking of peripherals, Western Digital has announced a new WD My Book based on the USB 3.0 specification with an adapter card, which will make an existing desktop PC USB 3.0-compatible.

Also, cards that go into a laptop’s ExpressCard slot are available, Ravencraft said. This allows an existing laptop to be upgraded to 3.0.

HP is now offering an Envy 15 laptop model with USB 3.0 connectors, and Acer was showing a raft of laptops on the CES show floor with the new standard, including the NX90Jq.

In the top video segment, Ravencraft discusses some of the new peripherals and what USB 3.0 means. The second segment is a brief demonstration of USB 3.0 transfer speeds versus USB 2.0. The first transfer seen in the segment is USB 2.0 sending photos that total roughly a couple of hundred megabytes. The second is the same group of photos using USB 3.0.

Updated at 10:30 p.m. PST: updating comparison of USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 transfer speeds.