USB versions up to 2.0 use Unicode as their encoding method, while versions 3.0 and higher have begun using 8b/10b encoding. USB 2.0 and 3.0 both operate at 5V, 1.8A, but USB 3.1 rose it to 20V, 5A, enabling users to power up larger devices. The reason for this is because the 2.0 uses the half duplex data transmission method whereas the 3.0 and newer use the full duplex data transmission method. This means that data can be sent and received simultaneously with the latest flash drives, while data can only be sent or received at a time with 2.0 and older. 3.0 and 3.1 have since improved upon this speed by bringing it up to 5 Gb per second and 10 Gb per second, respectively.Īlso regarding data transfer, the USB 2.0 and older models are only capable of processing data in a single direction at a time, but newer 3.0 and 3.1 models allow for data transfer in both directions. USB 1.0 only had a data transfer speed of 12 Mb per second, but was later sped up to 480 Mb per second with USB 2.0.

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Flash drives usb 2 vs usb 3