With USB 3.0 coming out very soon, it is expected all that had preceded it (USB 1.0, 1.1 and 2.0 for instance) will be destroyed by how fast it can access other USB 3.0 enabled devices. Tweaktown [ site here ] puts an early chipset through its paces against Firewire 400, Firewire 800, eSATA, SATA and USB 2.0 of course with varying results.

In our first test using HD Tune Pro, we can see that USB 3.0 is plenty faster than USB 2.0 when using the Intel SSD. It’s not 10 times faster as the marketing data tells us, but it is six times faster and a good sign for a technology still in its early stages of deployment in the consumer space.

Tweaktown shows a few graphs worth of information that show how you might want to hold off and buy a SATA 2.0 and USB 3.0 based motherboard for your next PC build. Definitely worthy of a quick read [ read more ], and they found that SATA 2.0 is keeping pace and sometimes beat USB 3.0 – barely.

[ Tweaktown ]

By Luke Anderson

I remember back when FireWire was first introduced (yes, it’s actually called IEEE 1394, but I’m an old-school Mac guy, so it’s FireWire) and it had some incredible speed to it. Of course USB 2.0 eventually came along and became the more widely used standard. FireWire 800 came out a little while later, but despite its faster speed, never really caught on. Don’t count the standard out though, as a newer, faster version is coming this fall.

The newer FireWire spec is rated at transfer speeds of up to 3.2Gbit/s, which is a considerable jump. It is expected to be compatible with previous standards, something that likely contributed to the lack of interest in FireWire 800. Unfortunately with USB 3.0 on the way with 4.8Gbit/s, it faces some serious competition.

VIA [ Gearlog ]

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