USB - Universal Serial Bus

USB has been about for quite a while now and we are well into revision 2 of this technology. But how much do you really know about USB. many of us are happy that things just work others like myself want to find out a little more. In this article I will write about what USB is, the standards of USB how USB works and more. USB is very important because nearly all peripherals these days require a USB connection to work. USB is easy and its plug and play, it has become the the most widely used connection on PC's today.

What  is USB?

USB stands for Universal Serial Bus. A Bus for a computer is a mode of transport for data. Just like a bus would take you to work or shopping a computers bus takes the data to the places it needs to go. USB is a standard adopted by many hardware manufactures because of its versatility. Its use is to connect external peripherals to the computer and provide a quick and easy means of transporting that data to the required components inside the computer. USB supports nearly all modern devices like digital camera's, printers, scanners, MP3 players and many more. It has also took over the role of providing a connection for input devices such as Mice and Keyboards.

USB the multifunctional interface

The Universal Serial Bus came to take over from all those other connections that you once had to fiddle about with at the back of your computer. Maybe you still use them, but USB will replace them all. Remember the serial ports and Parallel ports. They were used for mice, printers, scanners, modems and much more. USB takes care of all that now. Also PS/2 ports will be on the way out as modern mice and keyboards are also USB enabled and require an adapter to work on the PS/2 ports. USB can also connect many of these devices at the same time so you don't have to keep switching between the ones you need at the time.

Advantages of USB

There are many advantages of the Universal Serial Bus. The most useful one in terms of today's computing is the true plug and play nature it has. This means that you can simply connect and disconnect devices on your computer and it will instantly recognise them without you having to re-start your PC. You can also have many USB devices connected to your PC at the same time and even buy hubs that allow you exceed the amount of USB ports you have on your PC. In fact you can "daisy chain" up to 127 USB components / peripherals at the same time to one PC. Good luck to you if you need more than that :)

There are other smaller advantages of USB but useful none the less. Devices that require extra power in small amounts can draw power through a USB port optical mice with lasers are a good example of how this can be useful. The USB 2.0 standard raises the power even more and can even do things such as re-charge MP3 players. The USB standard is also hot swappable, This simply means that devices can be swapped in the same port and the computer will know the old device has gone and a new device is present. Older ports would not recognise this and drivers would get mixed up causing errors.

Type A and Type B connectors

To make life easier for the average PC user the USB standard comes with two connector types. The first is Type A, This connector connects to the PC's USB port. The Type B connector looks completely different and is for connecting to the relevant peripheral. This is the case in most cases, however only the type A connector is truly standard. the Type B connector could be changed in size etc with individual peripherals meaning they require there own unique cables. You will find however that this is quite rare.

Type AType B

USB 2.0

The USB standard was welcomed with open arms for users and manufacturers alike, it did however come quickly to to its limits in terms of how much data could be transferred. The original USB 1.1 standard could only transfer 1.5 Mbytes/s. This was fine for most peripherals of the time but soon became an unacceptable speed when large size MP3 players and external hard disks and other storage devices came about. Enter USB 2.0. USB 2.0 can transfer data up to a peak rate of 60 Mbytes/s, that's a full 40 times faster than USB 1.1. Now you can have them external devices running as fast as you need them to.

Adding more USB ports to your PC

Many of you will have limited USB ports or will have the older USB 1.1 ports. You also wont want to upgrade your motherboard to keep higher rate ports or simply to increase the amount of ports that you have available. There are two very simple options available. For those of you that would like to upgrade to USB 2.0 the best solution would be a USB 2.0 PCI card. Simply install this card which will have approximately 4 extra USB ports on it and you instantly have USB 2.0 functionality. If you simply need some more of the same USB ports that you already have then the best solution here would be a USB hub. All you need to do is plug the hub into one USB port in your PC and you will have as many extra ports as your hub provides.