Universial Serial Bus (USB) 2.0 is a complete overhaul of the Universal Serial Bus input/output bus protocol which allows much higher speeds than the older USB 1.1 standard did. The goal of the new serial bus is to broaden the range of external peripherals that can be used on a computer. A hard drive can easily hit the USB 1.1 bottleneck whereas it now becomes more ‘usable’ under USB 2.0 conditions.

The attraction of USB 2.0 is clearly in its speed! USB 2.0 has a raw data rate at 480Mbps, and it is rated 40 times faster than its predecessor interface, USB 1.1, which tops at 12Mbps. Originally, USB 2.0 was intended to go only as fast as 240Mbps, but in October 1999, USB 2.0 Promoter Group pumped up the speed to 480Mbps.

Custom USB Flash Drives seem to be catching up too with the some hitting 30MB/s milestone. As for a lot of USB storage, burning a DVD-R at its fastest rate or 16x takes up 21MByte/s or 169Mbit/s. That translates to 35% of overall USB 2.0 speed. Hard drives, however, demand huge amount of bandwidth that USB 2.0 cannot meet; we’ve seen a USB 2.0 hard drive has sustained 36 to 40MBbyte/s in the absolute best scenario. USB flash drives have also reached 33MByte/s, but there seems to be some limitations in the NAND itself so you shouldn’t expect their speeds to skyrocket in a next year or two.