USB 3.0 - Physical Hardware

I mentioned before that there is a slight change in hardware for USB 3.0. There will be two more high speed connections that will allow USB 3.0 to have its higher transfer speeds. It will keep the USB 2.0 connection pins, which allows for backwards compatibility. All the pictures you may see online at various sites won’t look like what you'll see on your computer in the coming years. The current hardware isn’t as neat and nice as you will see. Judging from the pictures floating around, the hardware looks like it was hacked and cropped together.

One interesting aspect of the improvements being made is the actual cable wiring. In the past, the cables have always been copper, cheap, and abundant. With USB 3.0's increased speed capability, copper wiring isn’t going to hold up. 

This is where fiber optics comes into the picture. The new USB 3.0 cables will have a certain length of fiber optics and then go to a copper wire. It’s not clear how much of the wire will be copper and how much will be fiber optics, but I’m guessing the longer the cord, the less copper there will be. We have seen AT&T’s IPTV service use similar technology. It will be interesting to see what performance gains result from fiber optics over traditional copper. Is it time to buy some stock in fiber optics? I’m going to say yes.

Availability

This new technology sounds exciting, doesn't it? Well hold on a minute before you go running to get a new computer with USB 3.0. You won’t find any computer on the market with USB 3.0 yet. The official standard specifications for USB 3.0 haven’t been set in stone. Look for the official standards to be done sometime early in the second half of 2008. From there, it will be near the end of 2009 before we start seeing devices that support USB 3.0.

I don’t think we will see a rush to market USB 3.0 either. I don’t see many devices that will benefit from the additional speed. Perhaps external hard drives and HD media drives will benefit, but they are still very limited at this point. USB 3.0 doesn’t seem to be the kind of technology you need to rush out and buy. It’s something to look at when you buy a new computer. The worst case scenario is that your USB 3.0 device will run slower on the current USB 2.0 connectors.

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