25GB in 70 seconds with USB 3.0
The USB 3.0 specification guarantees an increased performance of 10 times compared to the capabilities of the current USB 2.0, providing a bandwidth of 600 MB/s second. Devices employing USB 3.0 specifications are planned to be available to consumers in 2009 or 2010 and would be backwards compatible with USB 2.0 and USB 1.1.

“Delays have held USB 3.0 back,” said Lars Giusti of Microsoft. However, he predicts that the fully signed-off USB 3.0 specifications would only be presented to the implementers in the USB 3.0 Promoter Groups in 2009. Subsequently, it would take approximately another year until broad-scale product deployment of host controllers, devices, and systems utilizing USB 3.0 would be available in the market.

President and general manager of the chipset business unit at AMD, Phil Eisler, released a statement saying, "The future of computing and consumer devices is increasingly visual and bandwidth intensive. Lifestyles filled with HD media and digital audio demand quick and universal data transfer. USB 3.0 is an answer to the future bandwidth need of the PC platform.”

SuperSpeed USB 3.0 Mini-B connector

Microsoft is currently in the planning stage of selecting which operating system to incorporate the USB 3.0 specifications into. “The Microsoft USB core team is currently evaluating which operating systems we should support USB 3.0 on. It's a difficult decision and a difficult choice because there are all these moving parts,” said Giusti.


“Our early indications tell us that most partners think that we should support USB 3.0 on at least Windows Vista.”

According to early information supplied by Microsoft the improvement in transferring large files using USB 3.0 based hardware will be considerable.

Performance comparison: Transfer of 25GB HD movie:

USB 1.1: 9.3 hours

USB 2.0: 13.9 minutes

USB 3.0: 70 seconds

source:
http://thefutureofthings.com/news/5739/25gb-in-70-seconds-with-usb-3-0.html