To illustrate how fast USB 3.2 Gen 2×1 (10Gbps) is in real-world scenarios, we compared the speed of five USB solid-state drives in the bar graph below. The new Gen 2×2 and 2×1 mode also reduce overhead from 20% to just 3% with the USB 3.2’s new 128b/132b encoding scheme hence, you see better effective throughput. But your mileage may vary depending on the system. When taken account protocol overheads, latency and flow control, the fastest USB 3.2 Gen 1 device should operate at near 450Mbytes per second whereas a USB 3.2 Gen 2×1 device – in best case scenario – should perform at 1.1Gbytes per second under ideal conditions. USB 2.0 is still widely used it delivers both Hi-Speed and Full-Speed mode that operate at 480Mbps and 12Mbps respectively. In real world, we’ve seen first generation USB 3.2 Gen 2×1 (aka SuperSpeed USB 10Gbps) SSD from Crucial manages to push the real-world performance close to 800MBps (or 6.4Gbps) whereas USB 3.2 Gen 1 (aka SuperSpeed USB 5Gbps) equivalent can reach close to 400MBps (or 3.2Gbps). It can also work with either legacy USB 3.0 Type-A or USB-C cables. Maximum theoretical data transfer is 5Gbps.
This mode, introduced as part of new specification, boosts 10Gbps transfer rate over a passive USB-C cable of 3m in length.
Now that the original USB 3.0 has received two major updates, we are now at USB 3.2. This is largely due to the fact that each new USB standard absorbs all previous 3.x specifications and at the same time gives them new monikers.
Since the introduction of USB 3.0, making sense of USB marketing names has been a source of frustration for consumers.