USB 3.0 starts appearing in products now. Storage is considered to be the mainstream scenario for the new standard. It clearly is, as most gear today is already equipped with 1Gbps networking ports. That includes laptops. And upgrading home network to 1Gbps is easy and inexpensive. With gigabit network, the raw speed of LAN interface is a double of the USB 2.0, most commonly used to connect external storage drives.

On my network I am getting sustained file transfer speeds in the range of 30 to 40 megabytes per second. That feels fast. A CD worth of content can be moved in or out in less than 20 seconds. But only to the internal drive on my laptop. Not long ago I bought the Western Digital Scorpio Blue 750GB, 2.5 inch drive to use as portable external storage. It fits nicely in one of the USB / Serial ATA enclosures I have. And with my Lenovo laptop, it can be powered directly from a single USB port. By the way this is some kind of a miracle... Almost a terabyte of storage, that fits on the palm of my hand, and powered by a single data port (and I still remember Microsoft announcing its TerraServer a few years back, the full racks of storage, full of noise and heat, a terabyte of capacity...). With that capacity, a fast I/O interface is a must. Formatting the drive takes a whole night (while nights are still long here in winter). Filling it up with content may take even longer. 480Mbps suddenly feels slow. I do not have any USB 3.0 gear yet, but can imagine how much faster it will be.

USB 3.0 brings - I think - more opportunities in other areas. The one especially interesting is Video. I wrote here about Mimo USB - based monitors. With 800x480 resolution they work over USB 2.0 and are powered by the same single port, that is used for image data transfer. Running video card over USB port seemed a strange idea to me at first. But if it worked, I would be very happy to use it, as the concept reduces cable count a lot. And it works. With the native resolution, the Mimo monitor can play full screen video, which is somehow hard to believe. But it does. Internally Mimo is based on DisplayLink technology. A special chipset designed to compress / decompress video on the fly to squeeze it to the limits of bandwidth of USB 2.0. There are other DisplayLink - based products too. HP and Samsung have larger displays and HP has laptop docking stations, that connect over a single USB cable and delivers all kinds of external connectivity, including video. Unfortunately HD Video playback is not possible with current USB 2.0 based products.

At CES I visited DisplayLink's stand to see what they are up to with the new USB 3.0 standard. They obviously had a demo of a full HD setup, playing full HD content over USB 3.0 monitor. DisplayLink drivers put some load on the host CPU, but I was surprised to see the entire HD playback was taking just 20% of just one core. That was a good news. With the new USB 3.0 chipset from DisplayLink, we may see even more video devices coming to market. Portable projectors will finally drop their bulky VGA cables. USB docking stations will be even faster and will offer full HD video playback. Larger USB powered screens will be more common too, as the 3.0 standard almost doubles the power that can be drawn from the port.

It will be interesting to see how the products develop. HDMI will be one of competing video interface standards, but even more interesting to watch will be the newely upgraded DisplayPort standard. With over 20Gbps, DisplayPort 1.2 offers the highest bandwidth of the three, sufficient to carry four 60Hz FullHD video streams. DisplayPort also offers virtualized USB at 720Mbs and Ethernet. That means single - cable, multifunction displays too - with embedded webcams, speakers, USB hubs. In the end we may see HDMI being replaced by both USB and DisplayPort quite soon. It is good to have a promise to clean the current cabling mess... The next frontier is optical, with Intel's Light Peak being the harbinger. But it will take some time until optical interfaces take over.