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It is five years since the USB 2.0 standard was rolled out, providing a common high speed data transfer protocol for a swath of CE devices ranging from external hard drives to smartphones. Since then however, read/write speeds have continued to climb and USB 2.0, which has a maximum theoretical throughput of 480Mbps, has become something of a data transfer bottleneck.
USB 3.0, which can theoretically handle up to 5Gbps is designed to eliminate this bottleneck delivering transfer speeds up to 10 times faster than USB 2.0 devices. To put that in perspective, USB 3.0 is fast enough to download 8Gb of photos from a digital camera in just 20 seconds or download a 27Gb HD movie is just over 1 minute.