The net effect of this is that the protocol will do much better with huge data transfers such as those required by viewing an HD movie that's residing on an external hard drive.
With Bulk Streams, USB now supports multiple data stream transfers. In addition, USB 3.0 includes a new transfer method called Bulk Streams. In addition, USB 3.0 supports asynchronous data transfers, which means that, unlike USB 2.0, it doesn't need to wait to poll a USB device every time it wants to start shipping data one way or the other. Today, USB 3.0's SuperSpeed 5 Gbps (Gigabits per second) is more than ten times faster than USB 2.0's top theoretical speed of 480 Mbps (Megabits per second). In particular, eSATA has clearly been shown to be faster than USB 2.0. Various benchmarking tests support this claim. In either case, this requires extra steps and processing, which slows down the effective throughput. The other is to actually convert the data into one of the external data transmission protocols. The first is to encapsulate the SATA protocol-borne data into USB or FireWire. Thus, the argument goes, these devices must use a bridge chip to translate from the ATA protocol to USB or the FireWire IEEE 1394 protocol. Internally, these drives are still using SATA even if you're connecting to these devices with USB or FireWire on the outside. They can make this argument because the most common use for eSATA is for external hard drives.
While SATA and eSATA are both older than USB 3.0, its proponents would still claim that it's better than USB 3.0.
So that makes USB 3.0 better right? Well, while USB 3.0 is good, it's not as simple as "Whoever's the fastest wins." Let's take a closer look at these new and improved ports on our PCs.ĮSATA (External Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) is the external version of the technology, SATA, that your computer is likely already using for its hard drive. How things have changed! Now, eSATA can handle 300 MBps (MegaBytes per second) and USB 3.0 can wheel and deal up to 625 MBps. And, adding insult to injury, the standard was loose enough that you could have 'compatible' devices that you could never physically connect. If you've been in the computer business for any length of time you can probably painfully remember when serial RS-232 ports could barely handle 28 Kilobytes per second. Up-to-date computers now include external ports that, in theory, can handle data at rates of up to 5 Gigabits per second.