For years, USB 2.0 has dominated external peripheral connectivity for notebooks. Now things start to change with first wave of ExpressCard products, ranging from Toshiba laptops to a Lexar flash drive and an AverMedia TV tuner, hitting show floor at CeBIT 2004. In a nutshell, ExpressCard with a theoretical throughput at 500Mb/s is positioned to replace CardBus, limited to 132Mb/s, as the high-speed external bridge for PCI Express. In addition to speed improvement, it also supports 60MB/s USB 2.0 protocol as well. So, we may see USB peripherals tailored to fit into an ExpressCard slot in near future.

Currently, with ExpressCard only available on Alviso-era Centrino laptops, it is certainly not much of a threat to USB dominance. Though, as flash memory and HDTV demanding more bandwidth provided by USB, manufacturers will look to higher speed connectivity.


Source : EverythingUsb