It’s been a standard on most Macs and PCs since the late 1990s and has been updated several times since then.

Universal Serial Bus (USB) is the most common peripheral interface used to link one device to another and connect to a power source. We’ll tackle the two most common peripheral devices today-the USB-C and Thunderbolt 3.Īre you unsure what the differences between interfaces are and how they affect your backup plans? This installment of “What’s the Diff” is here to help! What Is USB? Some of these ports and interfaces look alike, but they perform differently. How many different adapters do you use to connect your computer to peripheral devices? There’s USB 3, USB-A, USB-C, HDMI… I could go on. We could go further in-depth, but everything else is pretty geeky (read boring), and hopefully, we answered your question.This post has been updated since it was originally published in March of 2019. If your computer was built after 2017, you probably have USB 3.2, which introduced two new SuperSpeed+ transfer modes over the USB-C connector using two-lane operation, with data rates of 10 and 20 Gbit/s (12 MB/s). Each version supports SuperSpeed preserving the original speeds while still increasing the speeds even further. USB 3.0 has been upgraded to USB 3.1, and finally 3.2 in 2017. It is recommended that manufacturers label SuperSpeed ports SS and use blue colored cables, so you know Superspeed is supported. Impressive.Īny USB device can benefit from faster transfer speeds using the SuperSpeed ports. SS refers to SuperSpeed, a new transfer rate that can transfer data at up to 5 Gbit/s (625 MB/s), which is ten times faster than USB 2.0. TIP: Hard to fix Windows Problems? Repair/Restore Missing Windows OS Files Damaged by Malware with a few clicks

Usb 2 vs usb 3 symbol