Asus is apparently planning to go all out in support of the new USB 3.0 standard. USB 3.0 offers data transfer speeds up to 10 times faster than the 480Mb/s you get from USB 2.0. And while you might think that Asus and other PC makers would focus first on bringing the new technology to high end computers with expensive hardware, DigiTimes reports that machines in the budget Eee PC netbook and Eee Box nettop lines will be getting a USB 3.0 bump soon.
With data transfer speeds up to 5Gbps, it’s very possible that the USB port will become one of the fastest components on your PC. In fact, it’s likely that you won’t get the full benefit of USB 3.0 if you’re using a cheap netbook, since the other components might not be able to handle that kind of speed. But Asus will also be bringing USB 3.0 support to its mainstream notebook line.