USB 3.0

Universal Serial Bus 3.0 (USB 3.0), marketed as SuperSpeed USB, is the third major version of the Universal Serial Bus (USB) standard for interfacing computers and electronic devices. It was released in November 2008. The USB 3.0 specification defined a new architecture and protocol, named SuperSpeed, which included a new lane for providing full-duplex data transfers that physically required five additional wires and pins, while also adding a new signal coding scheme (8b/10b symbols, 5 Gbit/s; also known later as Gen 1), and preserving the USB 2.0 architecture and protocols and therefore keeping the original four pins and wires for the USB 2.0 backward-compatibility, resulting in nine wires in total and nine or ten pins at connector interfaces (ID-pin is not wired). The new transfer rate, marketed as SuperSpeed USB (SS), can transfer signals at up to 5 Gbit/s (with raw data rate of 500 MB/s after encoding overhead), which is about 10 times faster than High-Speed (maximum for USB 2.0 standard). In USB 3.0 Type‑A and usually also Type-B connectors the visible inside insulators are often blue, to distinguish them from USB 2.0 connectors, as recommended by the specification, and by the initials SS. USB 3.1, released in July 2013, is the successor specification that fully replaces the USB 3.0 specification. USB 3.1 preserves the existing SuperSpeed USB architecture and protocol with its operation mode (8b/10b symbols, 5 Gbit/s), giving it the label USB 3.1 Gen 1. USB 3.1 introduced an Enhanced SuperSpeed System—while preserving and incorporating the SuperSpeed architecture and protocol (aka SuperSpeed USB)—with an additional SuperSpeedPlus architecture adding and providing a new coding schema (128b/132b symbols) and protocol named SuperSpeedPlus (aka SuperSpeedPlus USB, sometimes marketed as SuperSpeed+ or SS+) while defining a new transfer mode called USB 3.1 Gen 2 with a signal speed of 10 Gbit/s...