USB 3

[Sabre]

Article on it

The gen-three USB spec boasts a peak data rate of 5Gbps—roundabout 600MB/s, without taking overhead into account. Interestingly, this latest leap in USB bandwidth is proportionally smaller than the previous one. The original USB spec topped out at 12Mbps, making the jump to 480Mbps for USB 2.0 a forty-fold increase in available bandwidth. USB 3.0 only amounts to about a 10X increase over the prior standard.

Nevertheless, this new "SuperSpeed" spec should easily handle next-gen storage devices, even when you factor in overhead. According to the final specification, taking into account SuperSpeed USB's 8b/10b encoding, flow control, packet framing, and protocol overhead reduces effective throughput to a "realistic" 400MB/s for actual applications. Mechanical hard drives still have a long way to go before they can sustain transfer rates that saturate an old-school 150MB/s Serial ATA link, and even the fastest solid-state drives on the market aren't pushing data at much more than 200MB/s.

Speed = Good I'm shocked USB hasn't taken over most of the storage in a computer.

[drwrx]

Speed = Good I'm shocked USB hasn't taken over most of the storage in a computer.

Soon Grasshopper. Very soon.

My guess is that this will become the industry standard within the next generation of PC platforms.
Completely new motherboard architecture design is the probably the slowdown.

Hmmm, no more ATA, even for internal CD/DVD drives?

Perhaps it doesn't matter.

[Sabre]

It wouldn't take a completely new design, just a chipset that supports it (Usually called a SouthBridge chip). Lets hope we're right