USB 3.0

Looking for a powerhouse notebook computer that won’t break the bank and is easily portable? Then look no further than the ASUS N82Jq-A1, a 14” notebook with a 1.6GHz Intel Core i7 quad-core processor. 

Anyone who uses external hard drives regularly wishes they were faster. Once you start copying several gigabytes of data to an external hard drive, you’re in for a long wait. Most external hard drives connect to computers via USB 2.0, but USB 3.0 is ten times faster. While your computer probably doesn’t have a USB 3.0 port, Western Digital’s My Book 3.0 comes with a solution.

Portable hard drives are great because they allow you to walk around with a terabyte of data in your shirt pocket. But hard drives are delicate devices, they break easily when dropped and a terabyte of data is a terrible thing to lose. That’s why LaCie’s rugged portable hard drives are life—and data—savers. 

Portable hard drives are everywhere these days. Everyone has one, and most people are looking for something with greater capacity. One deterrent to purchases, though, is that interfaces keep changing as faster ones come to market. Happily, Seagate’s GoFlex portable hard drives feature a standard USB 2.0 interface, but can be upgraded later on. 

Unless you are on the bleeding edge of technology, chances are you haven’t used a USB 3.0 device yet. And unless you’re constantly reading up on the latest and greatest technology, you might not even know what USB 3.0 is all about.As the name implies, USB 3.0 is the successor to the ubiquitous UBS 2.0 interface. It provides faster transfer rates -- up to 5.0Gbps using a technology dubbed SuperSpeed. This is more than ten times the speed of USB 2.0 and, while you won’t get speeds like that in real-life use, you will see significant improvements over USB 2.0. It is also significantly faster than eSATA, FireWire-800, and FireWire-400.