It’s not often that a computer interface remains relevant over the course of a full decade, but that is exactly what USB 2.0 has accomplished since its release in April 2000. Over the past few years however, our media-dominated culture has experienced incredible growth and file sizes have increased exponentially and the aging interface simply can’t keep up in a number of tasks.Other interfaces have challenged USB 2.0 over the years but none have been successful in dethroning it. IEEE FireWire was developed by Apple in 1995 and has seen several revisions, ultimately making it faster than USB 2.0. But outside of the high-end audio/video segment, FireWire has garnered little mainstream support. A similar fate can be expected for eSATA, a promising variation of the internal SATA connection that was introduced in 2004. The biggest reason these technologies never really caught on is because they are limited to storage needs only while USB is much more far-reaching.It appears the only true successor to USB 2.0 is a revision of itself aptly called USB 3.0, dubbed “SuperSpeed” -- see our feature article USB 3.0: What You Need To Know. USB 3.0 supports theoretical transfer rates of up to 5 Gbit/s.