ExpressCard - ExpressCard 2.0

ExpressCard 2.0

The ExpressCard 2.0 standard was delivered March 4, 2009 at CeBIT in Hannover. It is expected to have a raw bandwidth of 5 Gbit/s (transfer speed 500 MiB/s or 0.5 GiB/s), which is ten times USB 2.0 (0.48 Gbit/s or 60 MiB/s), and includes USB 3.0 (5.0 Gbit/s or 625 MiB/s or 0.625 GiB/s). It complies with PCI-Express 2.0 and SuperSpeed USB, which is part of the USB 3.0 specification. It is backwards compatible with current ExpressCard modules and ExpressCard 2.0 modules will work in current slots. ExpressCard 2.0 products are expected to be in the market in late 2010. It's unknown at this point (October 2012) whether this standard is taking off in the marketplace. For most applications, USB 2.0 and 3.0 seems to provide the best interface. The main exception to this comes with video encoding. Most Systems use PCIe, ExpressCard/34 or Thunderbolt, as seen in some of the leading video encoding adapters. Some might argue that USB 3.0 and HDMI for High definition video leaves no room for ExpressCard and its successor.