USB 3.0

Features Overview :

Standard USB 3.0 Cables

* A new enhanced "SuperSpeed" data mode with 4.8Gbps raw transfer rate (nearly 10 times as fast as Hi-Speed USB 2.0)

* It operates in Full Duplex mode (to achieve 4 extra pairs of connections added for cabling)

* Completely Backward Compatible with USB 2.0 (despite of the change in cabling, the plug & receptacles have been modified for this feature)

* Instead of broadcasting the device's packet traffic to all the devices below the connecting host (like USB 2.0) it uses dedicated pipelining to each devices with the host system [Are you aware of Data Encapsulation of OOPs?]

* A single bulk transfer pipe can now manage multiple streams of data, in SuperSpeed streaming mode.

* Advanced power Management feature that provides supports for power consumption as per device demand & have low consuming sleep-modes.

* The voltage consumption has been downgraded to 4V from the previous 4.4V of USB 2.0 but the current up-limit is now significantly 80% increased now to 900mA - producing 4.5W at maximum power power utilization.

* Longer connector cable length will be supported. Although some speculate, at SuperSpeed mode the cable length will have to be limited to 3m (comparable to eSATA)

* PCIe2.0 Architecture has been followed & the signaling, encoding, equalization of data etc. are implemented the same way.


Operating System Supports :



Linux : The time isn't long past when Linux was critically blamed for NOT implementing support for new devices & drivers - but these days are gone, so far. With much of amazement, you will discover that the Linux is actually the first Operating System kernel to provide the native support for USB 3.0 with the release of version 2.6.31 on Sept. 10, 2009. While Fedora 12, OpenSUSE 11.2, Mandriva 2010 & Ubuntu 9.10 already backing it up, other distros are not left far behind. Obviously, the support is still not yet mature enough though but the developers are continuously burnishing to give a full-fledged SuperSpeed USB operative ability to the kernel.

Windows : As speculated, Microsoft is cooking the Windows 7 Service Pack 1 to have USB 3.0 driver stack as an update while the rumor says that Windows 8 will be having native support for it. But, Windows 7 Service Pack is subjected to having a release schedule of Q4 2010 and as per the rumor, you can expect Windows 8 General Availability later in 2011 or most probably in 2012. So, for now, the driver software bundled with the devices you buy, are the only get-away to make the things work.

Apple : On the other hand, there's no fuss from Apple regarding their story of SuperSpeed adoptation. Probably they are looking for providing a bit more sturdy solution this time & not to recapitulate the buggy release, as they did with USB 2.0, subjecting to a production delay