USB 3.0 and Bay Area computer consultants X2 Technologis make your network run faster.

In chatting with Steve Mays, The Smartest IT Guy Ever, he was fired up about USB 3.0!

USB 3.0 is coming with 50% more power to provide for more devices and 10x the performance.  What does this mean to you dear reader?  It means that even existing devices like hard drives, not to mention newer devices like SSDs, will go faster and devices that charge with USB will charge faster and possibly not need external power bricks.

Real world usage of USB 2.0 nets something less than 20MB/sec on external hard drives, if you factor in the theoretical 10x performance gain that would be something like 200MB/sec which is right up there with RAID arrays and fast SSDs. (There are claims that the USB 3.0 protocol could go all the way up to an unbelievable 25 Gbps!!)

It’s a nice and frankly overdue by 3-4 years step.

The whole ecosystem of devices are coming out now: motherboards with USB 3.0 ports, laptops, PCIe cards, Express Card slots, adapters, hard drives, everything!  Linux will have USB 3.0 support FAST and Microsoft/Apple will be bringing it on with their newer OS versions (Windows 7 and OSX 10.6) via patches.

Oh and did I mention that 3.0 ports are backwards compatible with 2.0 devices?