Description
Universal Serial Bus (USB) is a standardized connector that replaced a lot of other older connectors such as PS/2. Game Port and Parallel Port. It provides connection and data transferring, as well as power supply to portable devices.
Version
Different version have different transfer speed. It is easy to determine the version of the USB by looking at the color code on the connecter. Blue color coded USB are usually 3.0 or 3.1 while other colors are usually below 3.0. Also, USB 3.0 or above should have the word SS in front of the logo to represent Super Speed.Speed
The speed of USB is determined by it's respective versions. There are 4 major versions which is 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 and 3.1.There are two types of USB version 1.0 which is Low Speed (1.5 Mbit/s) and Full Speed (12 Mbit/s). 2.0 brings High Speed delivering 480 Mbit/s of data transfer. Version 3.0 speed is 10 times faster (5 Gbit/s, SuperSpeed) than version 2.0 and version 3.1 is twice as fast as version 3.0 (10 Gbit/s, SuperSpeed+)
This article is referred from Wikipedia's USB article.