News from CES 2009: prototype USB 3.0 demo

The much awaited USB 3.0 specification should turn up in devices by the end of this year, or early next. In theory a data transfer speed of up to 4.8 GB ( 600 MB/s) is announced. This is ten times faster than the current USB 2.0 standard. TG Daily reports on a USB 3.0 hard drive prototype presented at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

The prototype hard drive reached 1320 Mb/s (165 MB/s) in read operations and 1000 Mb/s (125 MB/s) in write processes. This is partly due to the type of hard disk used, qualified as "very fragile" but it does give an insight to the level of performance one can expect. These results are about 5 times superior to the best ones we got with USB 2.0 in our tests.



By the time of the official launch, it is likely that transfer speed will have improved. As with USB 2.0, it will then take some years before manufacturers can use a bandwith closer to the one announced.

> CES 2009: USB 3.0 slower than expected