There are two properties that help determine the speed of a PC component. The first is the actual physical speed of the circuitry carrying the component's signal, the second is the protocol that is used. If your protocol is clunky, your speeds are going to be slower than they could be and the latency of the component is going to be high. Often times, though, no one will notice that the protocol is less than ideal until the physical speeds of the component improves. It's sort of like driving in a VW Beetle. Great when you're single, not so great when you got family and need a car for vacation. You've outgrown the car; you can outgrow the protocol.
Early implementations of USB use a protocol called Bulk-Only Transfer (BOT). Since the hardware that USB connected was significantly faster than the USB signal (external hard drives, for example, were much faster than the USB cables that connected them to the PC), it didn't matter that the protocol was slow and chatty. USB 3.0 comes along though, at speeds of 5 Gb/sec, and now the USB connection is faster than the hard drive. Now your chatty protocol matters.
The engineers at ASUS have developed a new protocol called UASP, USB Attached SCSI Protocol, to replace BOT. Read about UASP's specs here.
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