A cable for the data highway. While the most commonly used USB 2.0 has a data transfer rate of 480 Mbit/s, USB 3.1 takes things much further. In the present version 3.1 Gen 1 (3.0), the transfer rate reaches a speed of 5 Gbit/s. It is more than 10x faster than USB 2.0. This is particularly noticeable when transferring large amounts of data, such as for data backup. The transfer is also 10 times faster.