incase some of you guys havn't heard
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9780794-7.html

The current USB 2.0 version has a top data-transfer rate of 480 megabits per second, so a tenfold increase would be [USB 3.0] 4.8 gigabits per second. Many devices don't need that much capacity, but some can use more, including hard drives, flash card readers and optical drives such as DVD, Blu-ray and HD DVD. The fastest flash card readers today use IEEE 1394 "FireWire" connections that top out at 800 megabits per second.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081117-usb-3-0-specification-finalized-devices-in-2010.html

The new standard isn't expected to start headlining on motherboards until the latter half of 2009 (at the earliest), with compliant devices hopefully appearing sometime in 2010.

the article mentions this and is true, but most people dont need to utilize giga bites per second when megabites work just fine. but for those of us who us terrabite harddrives and transfer movies back and forth etc this is gonna be the best thing since sliced bread

edit: most usb's dont even xfer at 500 mb/s but usually flow around an average of 100 to 200 mb/s

This post was edited by Kamikizzle on Dec 24 2008 01:53am

Gotta say, I am not very excited by this.

well thanks alot negative nancy

it's technology

shit's always going to get better

the only reason I would see this as "not exciting" is that the only place anyone would benefit from this is with media (movies, songs etc.)
any scientific data representation would take longer to produce than it would to transfer onto current devices so an increase in the speed of these portables storage devices doesn't help at all

I jizzed in my pants

That might be kinda cool for more network over usb type devices. Depending on how long the cable restrictions are for the new spec, that would be pretty damn nice for external hdd clusters.

Hi Paul

I'm a fan

Well shit, I'd be planning to build a PC in the mid-later part of 2009... but I just bought a usb 2.0 external enclosure.

I guess I could settle for the transfer speeds with SATA.

This post was edited by LouisLeGros on Dec 27 2008 05:26pm

Totally wrong, when you have incredibly large amounts of data, the extra speed really helps. Let me give you an example, my cousin manages a database of the information of all the homes in new jersey. Imagine the size of that database -- I walked into his office and it had 32 computers in it, and hes the only one who sits in that office, the only person. Also, scientific data often times has pictures/graphs/ 3D graphs sometimes, many things that would take a long time to transfer -- but anyways lol you don't have to use it...you can stick with usb 2.0