>8. USB 3.0 will replace SATA, eSATA, what’s left of PATA and IDE, what’s left of Firewire 400 and 800, and every other internal and external interface standard that uses wires. USB 4.0 will never come out.
I hope not; USB isn’t that great of a transport-system. Sure it works fine for a keyboard and mouse, but FireWire really is worlds better (the power-supplied by the bus is more reasonable, the speeds are [in practice] better, the multiple-device communication is better, there’s even guarantees in its spec for A/V bandwidth)... it really is disappointing that the HDTV market [here] went with the HDMI connector as the Asian markets have some really nice [consumer-level] entertainment-systems which are FireWire based, as I understand it.
I wholeheartedly agree that FW 400 is faster and better than USB 2.0 — but the FW folks had their heads stuck quite far up their butts regarding getting products made. We can blame HP for sticking us with USB, but we are indeed stuck with it. Had anyone bothered to standardize on FW right away (this means you, Apple), for keyboards, mice, flash drives (a FW flash drive was once made, I’ve heard), printers, etc, along with the usual external hard drives and cameras, that format war would have been over in about a year.
http://www.apple.com/thunderbolt/
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3069803?start=0&tstart=0
http://www.gizmag.com/apple-hybrid-displayportusb-30-connector/18340/
USB 2.0 is pretty good, I benchmarked it at about 20 Megs/S.
Comes in about 80% as fast as my board-mounted hard drives, my machine has dual buses, running at 133 mhz FSB speed.