We already know most of what there is to know about USB 3.0—officially dubbed SuperSpeed USB—but today it's officially set in stone. To recap, with transfer speeds of 4.8Gbps, it'll dump a 25GB HD file in about 70 seconds, and the architecture has been beefed up with extra data lanes to make for more sustained, rather than bursty transfer speeds, making it better for camcorders and the like. Even though it delivers more power than USB 2.0 to charge gadgets faster (and it'll revive a completely dead one too), its new polling architecture makes it more efficient.


The one bad bit of news is that your old USB cables won't deliver SuperSpeeds—you'll have to have USB 3.0 gear from end-to-end to get the ridiculous transfer rates because the cables have extra pins for data, though it is all backward compatible. On the cable front you've got three plugs: Standard A (which looks like the one you know and love), standard B (the square one), mini B (which looks like a bizarre double-headed monster) and micro. We should start seeing the first USB 3.0-equipped gadgets sometime in 2010, though mayyyybe by the end of 2009 if we're lucky. [USB]