Next year, a mass rollout of USB 3.0 devices will begin.

These devices are ten times as fast as USB 2.0 devices which have speeds of 480Mb/s to 5Gb/s. It is also referred to as SuperSpeed USB. It is faster than an external SATA drive.

NEC Electronics of Japan is expected to produce a million chips a month. According to the article at Channel Register, there will be 340 million USB 3.0 PCs in 2012.

These devices are designed to speed up backup operations and to be more practical.

Source: Channel Register