USB 3 – Now This Is Going To Be Good
Many of us slightly older folk will still remember the humble floppy disk which was the computing industries first real mobile storage media for the mainstream user and when first introduced was an ideal way of transferring data across computers, as long as you did not mind formatting the disk or re-writing it a number of times because of corruption on the first few attempts.
Also the USB 1.0 format was relatively new back in the day, devices that took advantage of the technology were relatively thin on the ground so if you were really lucky you did not have to get involved with larger files that often required spanning across many disks which was even more fraught with frustrastion.
But as files grew larger the floppy simply did not make the grade, but as time passed the CD writer came of age which could hold a hefty 500mb of data, still a little more than most people required and media was originally quite dear as well.
Fortunately the USB (universal serial bus) standard was rapidly gaining ground and it was not long before a new breed of mobile storage hit the market which was of course the humble memory stick also affectionately called a thumb drive. These simple plug an play devices could hold a heady 2,4,6 or even 8mb of data (ok don’t laugh) and data transfer speeds of 12mbps which although slow by modern standards was in fact blisteringly fast back then.
The computer repair and IT industries where some of the first serious adopters of pen drives primarily due to the fact that system tools could be easily carried on a flash drive and with the larger capacities reduced the need to carry around a number of CD disks used for diagnostics or computer maintenance utilities.
As capacities grew though faster data transfer speeds were needed and this led to the emergence of the second generation of USB …USB 2.0.
The emergence of USB 2.0 and hi speed USB was a bit of a debacle for many consumers however as many USB pen drives and PCI cards were sold at the time claiming to be USB 2.0 but it was not made clear that the devices still only had the transfer speeds of 12mbps as opposed to 480 mbps.The problem was so widespread that many countries trading standards bodies were involved due to consumer lobbying for clearer packaging.
The USB interface and standard is now nicely matured and USB interfaces are common across a range of consumer devices from phones to cameras and even video players although it was and still is to a degree questionable as to whether USB or Firewire would win the day as the dominant data transfer protocol.
The USB pen drive has really risen to the challenge to take advantage of the USB interface and storage capacities are enormous and far beyond most peoples requirements, What were almost in the beginning icons of your technical prowess have now become a mainstream device and sales are said to exceed 150 million units per year just for pen drives alone. The USB interface is also said to be present in over 6 billion consumers devices and this number is growing at over 30% per annum.
Increases in drive capacities has raised a number of issues across many industry sectors including the data recovery industry, which has had to evolve new USB memory recovery techniques for recovering data from these flash based devices.
It is so easy to transfer and store data on these devices that many users are really taking them for granted and not saving their data elsewhere, which is all well and good until your drive breaks or gets damaged, or perhaps the memory controller fails.
Some Data recovery companies have of course stepped up the mark and the USB drive recovery industry is now alive and well.
Another issue these devices have highlighted is the need for security as sensitive data (business or personal) can be quickly and easily stolen from the source. Technology has answered the problem and secure pen drives are now available and manufacturing giant Fujitsu has continued its innovation in security with the invention of a smart USB drives which even have the ability to auto erase data on a USB memory device.
As it seems with all technology every development brings us even greater speed and the new USB 3.0 standard is no exception promising data transfer speed 10x greater than current specs which will give us transfer speeds around 5Gbps.
This very fast transfer speed may of course signal the end of the older firewire standard which has been falling behind more recently.
USB 3.0 standards have been ratified and the first devices are expected to be available towards the end of the year and it will also be interesting to see if Windows 7 ready boost feature will be able to increase the operating systems performance far greater than is apparent in Windows Vista.
