USB 3.2: These are the innovations

USB 3.2 is the latest version of the widely used transmission standard. The names of the individual versions can easily cause confusion, since the numbering was not always uniform in the past. We explain the most important thing in this post.

Even faster data transfer with USB 3.2

The latest version of the USB standard was announced at the Mobile World Congress 2019 in Barcelona. The central improvement lies in the higher data rate that can now be transmitted.

• In the future, you can transfer data between devices with the USB 3.2 standard at up to 20 Gigabit per second (GBit / s). Up to now, a maximum of 10 Gbit / s was possible.
• 20 gigabits correspond to the equivalent of 2.5 gigabytes. Assuming you want to copy the data of a full 1 TB hard drive from A to B, this would take less than seven minutes with the latest standard.
• USB 3.2 is only available with the new USB C plugs, which are installed in the current MacBook Pro and iPad Pro models, for example. In contrast to the previous versions USB 3.0 and 3.1, no combined USB A / C connections are supported. That means: Both the host device and the connected device must have a USB C port so that the fast transmission standard 3.2 can be used.
• The various USB versions become even more confusing in the course of a renaming, which was announced in parallel with the introduction of the new 20 GBit / s standard. The original USB 3.0 standard will in future be referred to as "USB 3.2 Gen 1", the previous USB 3.1 as "USB 3.2 Gen 2". The new standard with 20 GBit / s is fully referred to as "USB 3.2 Gen 2x2".
• Many experts criticize that this logic can hardly be understood by the end customer. So the simple advice is: When purchasing USB devices, follow the data rate specified. If this is specified with 20 GBit / s, it is a device with the very latest specifications.