USB 3.0 or SuperSpeed is a major revision of USB with a 5 Gbit/s transfer rate, which is much higher than currently widely used USB 2.0 standard. Mac OS X Lion (10.7 and 10.8), Windows 8 and all major Linux distributions support USB 3.0, whereas Windows 7 has no support for USB 3.0 at the time of writing this article.
USB 3.0 or SuperSpeed : Architectural Differences
USB 3.0 has almost the same specification like USB 2.0 but there are many improvements in bulk, control, isochronous and interrupt transfer types. In other words, there is hardwarewise physically a fully different separate channel for USB 3.0, which otherwise looks like USB 2.0. Power management and Stream Protocol are newly introduced. The exact design like that of USB 2.0 makes it backward compatible. In the article on Micro USB and Mini USB Connectors and Plugs, we mentioned about USB 3.0 Micro plugs plus backward compatibility retains the functionality of older USB devices like USB Hub, which is used to Increase the Number of USB Ports. USB 3.0 sports with dual bus architecture to make USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 work at high speed.
USB 3.0 or SuperSpeed : Available Devices
Intel has chipset with integrated USB 3.0 ports, all Apple MacBook series released in Mid 2012 and later has USB 3.0 Ports, Samsung has Micro USB 3.0 on some of their devices, Seagate has portable HDD with USB 3.0 port.
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As the major player is becoming Thunderbolt, it will difficult to predict the possible future of USB 3.0. More information on USB 3.0 can be found here :
1 | http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5172 |
