What is USB 2.0?

[hmpua]

Hi all! What is USB 2.0? I heard it is faster than Firewire card. How does it work? How if I want to use USB 2.0 on my computer, what are the things I need? Please advise! Thanks!

[Sefy]

USB 2.0 is the next version of the USB standard, which provides a higher bandwidth, unfortunatly you can't just use it because of two reasons:
1) Your mainboard USB ports must support USB 2.0 specifications, it's not software upgrade
2) Microsoft will NOT support USB 2.0, so if we have to rely on them, it's a dead standard.

[hmpua]

Thanks Sefy! I don't quite understand! Microsoft will NOT support USB 2.0 then what is the use of having this new technology even if the mainboard supports it. Can you pls tell me where does this USB 2.0 become useful? In which system?

[cruffino69]

Check out http://www.usb.org/ for details.

Some of Sefy's comments are not quite accurate. Microsoft will be supporting USB 2.0 (see the above page for details), they just won't be releasing it with XP because they weren't ready in time.

He is right in that you must have 2.0 hardware to take advantage of the update.

The speed increase is from 12Mb/s for a high speed 1.0 device up to 480Mb/s for a 2.0 device. It will definitely compete with Firewire, but is not necessarily faster than it (some versions of Firewire will be faster, they just may not be out yet, I'm no expert on Firewire).

The advantage of USB 2.0 is that it's backwards compatible with 1.0 stuff. What that means is that if you purchase, say, a USB 2.0 scanner and plug it into your USB 1.0 computer, it'll work at the 12Mb/s rate.

Hope this helps.

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The higher speed of USB 2.0 will be very useful for things that require as high a data transfer rate as possible, like external storage devices, video cameras, etc..

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: cruffino69 on 2001-10-03 07:53:19 ]</font>