Asked By
andrew word
30 points
N/A
Posted on - 09/23/2014
I want to buy a new laptop, but most of those I have seen sport USB 3.0 ports.
In what way are they different from USB 2.0 ports?
Will USB 3.0 ports cause compatibility problems with my other devices, such as printers, phone chargers, keyboard and mouse?
Will I have to find new drivers for all of these?
Answered By
points
N/A
#150940
What is the difference between USB 2.0 and USB 3.0?
Hello,
There are many differences between USB 2.0 and USB 3.0. The performance, port type – everything differs from each other.
USB 3.0 is much faster than USB 2.0. USB2’s transferring speed is about 480 MB/s where USB3 supports 4.8 GB/s. From one USB2 port, you can hardly power multiple USB devices but USB3 can power multiple devices from one hub.
USB3 comes in blue color where USB2 comes with grey color. USB3 can support both data reading and writing at the same time where USB2 can only handle one way data transmission.
If you have USB3 ports on your machine, it’s of best use. If you have USB2, don’t mind. You can use PCIe card that will create a USB3 port for you and you can enjoy the speed easily.
What is the difference between USB 2.0 and USB 3.0?
USB 3.0 ports will not cause any problem with devices like printers, keyboard, mouse, and others because it is in the nature of USB ports to be backward compatible. Backward compatibility means you can plug devices that use USB 2.0 and earlier connection to USB 3.0 ports without experiencing any problem.
Since the transfer speed of USB 3.0 is faster than USB 2.0, when you connect a USB 2.0 device on a USB 3.0 port, your transfer speed will be limited to the maximum possible speed offered by your USB 2.0 device. You will not achieve the maximum speed offered by the USB 3.0 port.
Now, if the opposite happens for example, you connect a USB 3.0 device on a USB 2.0 port, your transfer speed will be limited to the maximum possible speed offered by the USB 2.0 port. Also, you don’t need to install drivers for the USB 3.0 ports because the drivers come with the operating system.
But if your operating system doesn’t have the appropriate drivers for the USB 3.0 ports like if you are using a very old operating system such as Windows XP, you just need to install the latest Service Pack and it should fix the problem. USB 3.0 is the third major version of the USB standard or Universal Serial Bus.
This USB standard adds the new transfer rate called “SS” or “SuperSpeed USB” which offers a transfer rate of about 5 Gbit/s (625 MB/s). This is 10 times faster than the USB 2.0 standard.
