As ubiquitous as information technology is today, the flash drive as nosotros know information technology has been around for near a decade, having been outset introduced in late 2000. Expedition Technology developed the outset flash deejay and IBM marketed it nether the "DiskOnKey" brand, featuring a whopping 8MB of storage. This was impressive at the fourth dimension considering the grade factor and because floppy disks were withal widely used to move pocket-sized amounts of data.

Coincidentally, the first implementation of USB 2.0 was besides introduced in 2000. Although the interface has kept evolving and became mainstream in this last decade, information technology'due south starting to bear witness its historic period when performance is a concern. The interface's maximum throughput of 60MB/s is no longer cutting it, especially when you consider the fact that its communication is half-duplex, meaning that data can flow both means, but not at the same time.

Fifty-fifty the fastest USB 2.0 wink drives are unable to match today'due south conventional difficult drives. Because that we often cite difficult drives as the slowest component in a computer, it's almost time nosotros moved on. The storage industry has been preparing the shift to USB 3.0 connectivity for quite some time. Dubbed SuperSpeed USB, USB 3.0 offers bi-directional (total-duplex) communication and a tenfold boost in transfer speeds too as improved capabilities, all while maintaining compatibility with USB 2.0 devices. (Read our USB 3.0: What You Need To Know Guide for a full rundown of the new interface).

In terms of tangible improvements, USB 3.0 devices are not expected to reach their full potential at launch, merely equally the standard matures the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF) considers it reasonable to achieve a throughput of 3.2Gb/southward, or but virtually plenty to transfer a 27GB high definition movie in little over a infinitesimal rather than 15 or more than with USB 2.0.

In the last twelvemonth we have reviewed a handful of USB 3.0 devices and today several memory manufacturers offer flash drives claiming to employ the extra operation offered by the revamped interface. Today nosotros are looking at 3 64GB flash drives: the AData Nobility Series N005, Kingston DataTraveler Ultimate iii.0 and Patriot SuperSonic.

Equally an added annotation, information technology's unfortunate that USB iii.0 adoption isn't happening as quickly as it could because neither AMD or Intel have shipped chipsets with built-in support for the interface. This mostly affects mainstream adoption though, while on the desktop PC side virtually all new motherboards are providing support courtesy of third-party controllers.