[INDUSTRY] USB 3.0 coming out this winter? Also, explanation on data sizes!

Link is here.

Apparently USB 3.0 may come out in the fourth quarter of 2009. For those who don't know, USB is the type of plug (a simplification) that many compute peripherals use. It's the rectangular, usually black, plug/wire that your keyboards, mice, headsets, external hard drives, cameras and many other devices use. When it first released it was a tremendous replacement over PS/2 plugs (circular plugs that your mice and keyboard used) due to its higher transfer rate and "plug and play" ability.


USB 3.0 means that soon you'll have even faster transfer rates, useful if you do backups regularly (which you should!) or hate having your photos take hours to transfer from your camera. It also might be fast enough to do 1080i HD streams, meaning that you could have your computer store high def TV shows or movies and play them on your TV with no buffering.

Here's a list of USB versions, their release years and their transfer rates:

USB 1.0 (1996): 12 Megabits per second
USB 2.0 (2000): 480 Megabits per second (40x faster than 1.0)
USB 3.0 (2009?): 5 Gigabits per second (~10.6x faster than 2.0, ~427x faster than 1.0)



For those who don't know, a bit is the smallest representation of data in the world of computers. It is quite literally a digit that stores one of two values: 0 or 1. Those who are more mathematically inclined may realize that it's just a base 2 digit. All data, without exception, is composed of bits. Explaining how that works would make this post too long, but I'll try to tackle that in the future.

The next step up from bit is a byte. A byte is 8 bits. 10010011 would be an example. This is still too small for most people to care about it though.


The next step up from that is a kilobyte (kb). A kilobyte is 1024 bytes. Notice that despite the "kilo" prefix, it's not exactly 1000. A one page Microsoft Word document that has some formatting with it (bold, italics, etc.) is about 25 kb.

The next step after that is the megabyte (mb), and you should definitely know this one. It's 1024 kilobytes. The average compressed song (mp3, for example) has approximately 1 megabyte per minute. A 4 minute song is about 4 megabytes.
The highest size that you'll care about for now is a gigabyte (gb). Your hard drives are bought in these sizes. A gigabyte is 1024 megabytes. An average hard drive bought in the last couple years is around 250 gb. The size of the Windows XP operating system is about 4 gb.

A megabit is just 1/8 of a megabyte (remember, 8 bits = 1 byte). Data transfer rates tend to be given in bits rather than bytes for precision. A gigabit is 1/8 of a gigabyte. Thus, if something had an 8 gigabit/second transfer rate, that is the same as transferring at 1 gigabyte/second.

How long would it take to transfer:

• 12 1 page Word documents (300 kb)
  
• 100 4 minute songs (400 mb)
  
• The entire contents of a hard drive (250 gb)
  

USB 1.0: .2 seconds, 266 seconds, 47 hours
USB 2.0: .004 seconds, 6.6 seconds, 71. minutes
USB 3.0: .0004 seconds, .625 seconds, 6.6 minutes

How's that for a speed increase? You could copy your entire hard drive in almost seven minutes over a plain, cheap cable available anywhere.
















Note: hard drive manufacturers in particular tend to be imprecise with their sizes. A 500 gb hard drive, for example, is actually (500 * 1000 kilobytes * 1000 bytes) 500,000,000 bytes. Technically it should be (500 * 1024 kilobytes * 1024 bytes) 524,288,000 bytes. You ended up losing out on 24,288,000 bytes, or about 23 actual megabytes.

They do that because it makes their sizes look bigger than they actually are, even if it's a headache for everybody else.

My calculations above are based on the "ideal" numbers, not the actual ones. A 250 gb hard drive using 1024 as the prefix multiplier instead of 1000 is larger, so the times I listed above for transferring a hard drive should be slightly faster in reality since there's less data.