USB Standard Speeds Ahead

If you thought the USB 2.0 standard was pretty fast, hold on to your horses. USB 3.0 is in the works, promising to offer ten-times the bandwidth throughput of the current USB 2.0 standard. This means that if it now takes five-minutes to transfer tunes from your PC to your MP3 player, you'd be able to perform that same task in just about half-a-minute!

We likely won't see a wealth of new products that are compatible with USB 3.0 for another few years, but it's interesting to note how quickly (literally) technology is advancing.

Speeds are getting faster, hard drives getting larger, and devices are performing more functions than ever; not to mention that digital content is truly in abundance these days. I know people who have separate notebooks or hard drives just to house their digital tunes. I'm no exception: my photo storage Website has hundreds and hundreds of digital photos spanning the past several years, from vacations, to milestone events with family and friends.

The average person is liable to want to transfer these massive amounts of content back and forth amongst various devices: a new MP3 player, a back-up copy for a friend, and so on. Quick speeds are certainly important now, but being able to speed up the transfer process will become increasingly important as hard drive capacity and digital content availability continues on its path of consistent and rapid growth.