Our USB Selection

We lose our USBs every once in a while. Nowadays they are cheap, universally available and reasonably reliable. When we go to buy USBs we are generally presented with quite a few options, including USB 3.0, USB 2.0, USB 3.1 gen 1 and finally USB 3.1 gen 2. We usually don’t really give a thought about what they mean, and even sometimes don’t even bother to check which one it is, considering that in today’s day and age one will very rarely find a USB 2.0, it isn’t that big of a problem either but as files grow larger and we are exposed to greater speeds, even the USB 3.0 standard will seem a bit slow.

What is a USB?

USB stands for Universal Serial Bus, and as the name implies is an interface that is used for serial communication between devices. What serial communication means is that the 1s and 0s are sent one after the other as opposed to parallel communication. This also removes a common misconception that flash drives are USBs. Flash drives are commonly referred to as USBs but in fact just operate on the USB interface. You may have connected a webcam or external hard drive through a USB interface too, and these devices operate in the way i.e. serially.

Now let us move to what these different types of interfaces mean. As you may have guessed, they differ with respect to speed, USB 2.0 being the slowest and USB 3.1 gen 2 being the fastest.

USB 2.0 has an effective speed of 280 megabits per second even though the theoretical limitation of USB 2.0 is 480 megabits per second. Similarly USB 3.0 has a theoretical speed of 5 gigabits per second, this is a significant improvement over the old standard (over 10 times the theoretical speed), and finally USB 3.1 has a theoretical speed of 10 gigabits per second.

It may be noted that the USB-IF published an article that the USB 3.0 standard capable of transfer speeds upto 5 gigabits will now be classified as USB 3.1 gen 1 while the USB 3.1 interface capable of transfer speeds upto 10 gigabits per second will be classified as USB 3.1 gen 2 but for the sake of convenience we will refer to 3.1 gen 1 as 3.0.

So it is pretty clear that we should choose the fastest of the lot right? Well it depends if you really are going to take advantage of that speed. If you are using an SSD in your laptop or desktop then a USB 3.1 should be preferred because it can take full advantage of that 10 gigabit speed. If you are still stuck on that HDD then a USB 3.0 is enough for your need since you will not be able to access that speed anyways. Some of the advanced users might be thinking that a USB 3.1 would be better in applications such as running an OS off of a drive but that is a novel use case, and we will only be taking about referring a flashdrive as a storage device here.

As far as compatibility is concerned, USB 3.1 is a comparatively new standard and is not supported on all devices. We can find new motherboards providing connections that are USB 3.1 compatible but it is not as widespread as USB 3.0. When it comes to laptops, most of the high end laptops using USB Type-C are USB 3.1 compatible, but this trend has yet to trickle down to lower end machines.

Conclusion:

So, as a conclusion, what should be our choice? We would say that buying a USB 3.0 is the safest bet for everyone considering the current prevalence of the standard and its reasonable speed. You can find this written on the USBs themselves and also on their sale covers so no need to investigate the model on the internet, but it is still advised to be wary of counterfeits because they not only have lower transfer speeds but also don’t last as long.