While 3rd generation USB is good news; let’s put things in perspective. When you are fetching small files, the cache and the burst speed of a protocol makes a big difference. However, when you are tranferring large amounts of data (copy files from one drive to another) you quickly saturate the on-board cache, and the mechanical drive of the Hard drive becomes the bottle-neck. It doesn’t matter how fast your protocol is (Firewire, hyper-transport, USB3, whatever) it simply has little meaning.
The mechanical hard drive can only spin so fast, it can only move the heads at a particular speed; I’ve seen large data transfers slow down to 12-25 MB/sec simply because that’s the mechanical limitation of the drive.
So, if you have a new High Definition video recorder, you are not going to transfer your 8 Gig SDD card in ~3 seconds. The Hard drive simply can’t load the data that fast; even if the USB3.0 protocol can theoretically move the data that fast.
HOwever, when we are using a Solid State Hard Drive, there is a significant performance bump where tranactions can mean that files transfer data at up to 201 MB/s.
Unless you dump your standard hard drive, and go with a SSD of suitable size, USB3.0 won’t mean a whole lot to you. IMHO, your mileage may vary.
I might back up a couple hundred GB twice a year using USB. I start it and come back later. The increase in speed is pretty insubstantial compared to 1.0 to 2.0.