Over the years USB has gone through several iterations. And now with the latest version, USB 3.0, promising faster data transfer speeds, and become ideal for today’s bandwidth intensive devices and applications. USB 3.0 has raised the transfer rate to 4.8Gb/second. This improvement on the USB standard already opens a host of performance to increase peripheral devices, primary among them making external USB hard drives as fast and useful as current internal SATA hard drives.

The new USB 3. is backward compatible but uses a slightly modified connector to achieve the SuperSpeed transfer rates. In general, any older legacy USB device will work just fine with a USB 3.0 equipped computer. The only exception to this is that USB 2.0 cables must be used to connect a 2.0 device to a newer USB 3.0 computer, because the USB 3.0 cable design does not work in older USB 2.0 slots. It should also be noted that the USB standard can utilize cables of up to 5 meters in length but that USB 3.0 devices will only operate at SuperSpeed rates if the cable is 3 meters or less in length.