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LAS VEGAS--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.
Transfer time comparison as shown by Asus at CES
Transfer time comparison as shown by Asus at CES
(Credit: Brooke Crothers)
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.
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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.