Universal Serial Bus (USB)

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Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an innovation in computer peripheral technology that enables you to add devices such as audio players, scanners, printers, network cards, and external hard drives to your computer without having to add an adapter card or even having to turn the computer off. USB comes in two flavors right now:

 

·         USB 1.0 USB 1 has a transfer rate of 12 Mbps, which is an amazing speed, considering that serial ports and parallel ports offer only a speed up to 2 Mbps.

·         USB 2.0 USB 2.0 has a transfer rate of 480 Mbps! This difference in transfer rate dramatically reduces the time it takes to transfer data from one network component to another. For example, last week I was transferring a 3GB file from my USB 2.0 drive to the hard drive on the computer, but because there was not a USB 2.0 driver loaded, the system was treating the device as a USB 1.1 device. As a result, the file copy operation was going to take 67 minutes! I chose Cancel and then updated the driver to USB 2.0 and attempted the file copy a second time; this time it took 3 minutes. Gotta love USB 2.0!

Most systems today have USB ports on both the front and the back of the computer. You can also purchase a USB hub device that will connect to your system and allow additional devices to be connected to it.