Does anyone have an idea when USB3 will become available in Thinkpad's?

I don't know myself, but I do see the new Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex portable 2.5" external drives are selling well at Best Buy. They are 3.0, yet come with a 2.0 cable. (The 3.0 cable is sold separately)

I mention it, because unlike ExpressCard (which I saw as an option on ThinkPads before I commonly saw cards), this is a major laptop peripheral which is widely available before the laptops themselves. Hopefully it will push Lenovo into 3.0 sooner rather than later, if it's not included in the next model designs already.

W510/W701 already have USB3.

Are they working alone like USB2 ports or a power supply is required ?

I'm using a Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex with a USB3 cable on my W510 and no power cord is needed. Not sure about other devices

How's the performance compared to 2.0?

This is old data, but first bench, using usb3 expresscard adapter and an external harddrive, concluded in 100+ MB/s.



Another long awaited feature is the event-driven bus (instead of a constantly polling one) which in theory would improve cpu usage and power consumption too.

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@ fasteez
Is a power cord required for an XpressCard ?

I don't know, it may supply power but it can depend on the XpressCard specs.
After a quick search (I'm not really knowlegable here anyway) it seems that XpressCard is a little bit low on power supply , 3.3V instead of the 5V of USB2/3 ...