With the improvement of technology, USB 3.0 will be released soon !!

Intel and other companies have formed a group to release the USB 3.0 specification in the first half of 2008.

According to Pat Gelsinger, general manager of Intel’s Digital Enterprise Group, the USB 3.0 (Third-generation Universal Serial Bus interconnect) has a data-transfer rate of 4.8gigabits per second, which is exactly ten times faster than the current USB 2.0 (480 megabits per second).

Many devices don’t need that much capacity, but some can use more, including hard drives, flash card readers and optical drives such as DVD, Blu-ray and HD DVD. The fastest flash card readers today use IEEE 1394 “FireWire” connections that top out at 800 megabits per second.

The USB 3.0 will be designed using both copper and optical cable capabilities. With this technology, even higher speeds will be possible in the future. The USB 3.0 will also offer greater energy efficiency to help us save energy and money.

According to Gelsinger, it will be backward compatible, so current USB 2.0 devices will be able to plug into USB 3.0 ports. Besides, there’s typically a one- to two-year lag between the release of the specification and the availability of the technology, so USB 3.0 products should likely arrive in 2009 or 2010.