In keeping with my latest trend to pick a long promised technology and bash the hell out of it for being late, I have chosen today to be the day I discuss USB 2.0.
Current USB technology lies at version 1.1, a 12MBps version that has been with us since it’s days in Windows 95 OSR 2.0, roughly 1996. It has now been almost 4 year since this technology has really caught on and become standard in the PC97 standards of our favorite technology titans. Now, those titans, along with many of the industry’s leading companies, such a HP, have taken it upon them selves to create a new USB standard, one faster and better than the others.
USB 2.0 weighs in at a whopping 480Mbps, which solves most bottlenecks of current USB 1.1. 480Mbps means 60MB/s of data transfer, which is more than enough for even today’s fastest hard drives. This of course leads me into today. It’s 2001, so where the hell is USB 2.0? When it was started a year ago, its technology was state of the art for it’s kind, offering about the same bandwidth as firewire, a predominately MAC bus. Within a few months, there will be Hard Drives that will be able to kick out 60MB/s and even more, making USB 2.0 once again a standard only used for digital imaging. Even then, it could possibly be a bottleneck, as scanners and cameras get more advanced. Digital imaging is a fast growing field, 1.5 years ago it would almost a dead market, but now with many people getting on the internet with promises to send Grandma the latest pics of the kids, people need those cameras and scanners.
As with DDR, I’d like to see USB 2.0 now, but I also realize that perfection takes time (just ask ALi). I will wait to see how USB 2.0 works out. I might even hold off getting my next motherboard until there is USB 2.0 built in, or even possibly firewire built into the south bridge. But then again, by that time, everything but the toilet will be built onto the Southbridge, and I’ll hardly ever have to leave the computer.
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