With Firewire not quite meeting the expectations hoped for, due in a large part to the high retail pricing of compatible devices, the door was left wide open for USB 2.0 with it's moderately priced compatible peripherals such as most modern printers and scanners, digital cameras, hard drives, and the list seems to be getting longer each day. The only problem is that unless you have a rather new motherboard, or have purchased a USB 2.0 PCI card, the new device's will not work in general, while some devices will work, but at reduced speed with USB 1.1 ports.