USB 3.0 (10X faster than USB 2.0) coming '08
According to the la-*test*-('") MaxPC, USB 3.0 is coming out later next year, possibly in the first half. It'll be 10X faster than 2.0 and will be backward compatible with all usb cables. A pci express card will offer it to current mobo's. Mobo's with 3.0 probably won't start arriving till 2009.

Cool, does this mean firewire will be a thing of the past ?

I think this will pretty much kill firewire on the PC.

What's Firewire? :P

FireWire 800 is decent in but less and less driver support. eSATA is the wat to go with HD's now-a-Day for external HD's. I am looking forward to the benchmarks for USB 3.0

I like how the card uses PCI-E, so we can have either fast usb transfers or decent gaming, but not both :D

Well most modern mobos have more than one PCI-E slot. My PC has a PCI-E x16 for the video card, and then a PCI-E x1 and a PCI-E x4 slot.

I wonder what the real benefit from this will be? KB/Mouse is fine at 1.1/2.0 speed, HD's will benefit along with thumb rives but how much faster will this port to be? Can we print faster than we currently do? Wont printer memory become the bottleneck?

Well this is a benefit because right now USB 2.0 is nowhere near as fast as an IDE or SATA drive. It's close, but not there. USB 3.0 will put it on the same playing field. It will also make it practical to stream video from a camcorder which you can't do on USB 2.0 (but you can on firewire which is really the only thing firewire gets used for on Windows PCs). Printers a pretty slow by comparison to hard drives or camcorders.

When it comes to printers, short of having USB ports themselves, or memory card slots, they don't even need more than USB 1.1, you wouldn't notice a difference. USB 2.0 is even more than enough for those needs. Now if you had a 3D printer being fed mass amounts of data, USB 3.0 could make sense. The one thing I wonder about USB 3.0, is the CPU overhead.

hmmm and I'm still running some hubs that are USB1, hence always the nagging messages about "this device could perform faster yadayada...." May be it would be time to upgrade some things soon