The USB standard has come along way since 1996, when it was first introduced.
USB 1 started at around 12Mb per second, this means that it would take 25 seconds to transfer one song to your Ipod. Luckily USB 2.0 came around in 2000 giving us 480Mb per second meaning that a song could be transferred to a device in about a second. This is the standard that we are used to but we want to put higher quality audio, photos, and videos on our devices so we need a new standard and we now have one.
USB 3.0 was introduced about 2.5 years ago and is just now getting out into the world. USB 3.0 is 10 times faster than USB 2.0 so you will be seeing transfer speed of 3.2Gb per second.
The devices and cards have just started coming out so you can retrofit your current computer, but we should start seeing new pcs come out with the new standard very shortly. Once the new pcs have the ports, we should start seeing Ipods that support USB 3.0 and you will be able to transfer music in a snap.
I am pretty excited about this, how do you feel?
Here are some USB 3.0 devices and cards that you can buy today. Keep in mind that USB 2.0 devices will work with USB 3.0 cards.