This year, USB 3.0 hard drives and other gadgets are finally hitting stores. You can buy them — they're real! They cost a little bit more up front, but the marketing speak promises data transfer speeds 10 times faster than the old USB 2.0 standard that you've been using for the past 10 years.
Is USB 3.0 really that much faster? And even if it's not, is it fast enough to justify the slight premium? Experts have already tested it. Here's what they discovered.
"10 times faster" on paper
USB 3.0 is capable of transfer speeds of up to 5Gbps (gigabits per second); that's a little over 10 times faster than USB 2.0's 480Mbps (1,000Mbps equals 1Gbps). In practice, it won't always be this much faster — mileage may vary depending on hardware configuration — but it will always be much faster than USB 2.0
The New York Times decided to test this "10 times faster" line, so it used brand new USB 3.0 hard drives and a desktop computer with an ideal configuration for transferring data over a USB 3.0 cable. In the test, writer Rik Fairlie copied a folder containing 10GB of files. He did this once over USB 2.0 and once over USB 3.0.
The USB 3.0 connection took 6 minutes, 31 seconds, and the USB 2.0 connection took 22 minutes, 14 seconds. That's still a dramatic improvement (USB 3.0 was about 3.5 times faster), but it doesn't live up to the marketing hype.
Other real-world tests have produced similar results — 23 seconds for 500 photos on 3.0, 1 minute and 12 seconds on 2.0 from Amazon, for example. TweakTown clocked the actual speed at 2.8Gbps. That's still mighty impressive. USB 3.0 is significantly faster than its predecessor; it's the difference between 20 miles per hour on a side street and 70 on the highway. It'll get you where you need to go much more quickly.
read more at http://yhoo.it/stRtYn
source: Yahoo! News
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