Ordered myself a USB 3.0 expansion card and a 500GB 2.5″ USB 3.0 external hard disk.
From the benchmarks, USB 3.0 looks at least 3x faster when it comes to external hard disks (70-80 MB/s vs 20-30 MB/s for a 2.5″ drive).
USB 3.0 hasn’t hit the mainstream yet.
But there are already USB 3.0 flash drives, external HDDs and external HDD boxes available. USB 3.0 will definitely replace USB 2.0, probably just like 2.0 replaced 1.0.
Will update the blog when my new hardware arrives.
The HDD works as advertised, doing about 81 MB/s on write and around 86 MB/s on read.
But when under heavy load, the HDD sometimes randomly disconnects itself, but no data corruption so far. I hope I will not have to RMA it.