During his keynote address at IDF this morning, Intel vice president and Kangol enthusiast Mooly Eden confirmed that the revolutionary Thunderbolt I/O technology will be making the jump from Macs to PCs when as-of-yet unidentified Asus and Acer models ship in the first half of 2012.

When Apple introduced Thunderbolt earlier this year, PC owners were left out of the high-speed data transfer party, the new I/O technology being an Apple exclusive. But now, with Thuderbolt running on both Mac and PCs - at double the throughput of the latest USB iteration - is there room left in the world for USB 3.0?

Thunderbolt is slated to offer a speed of 10Gbps (which is about 1.2GBps). Real-world storage products generally offer much less than that, but still boast very fast data throughput. The Pegasus R6, for instance, is much faster than even a SATA 3 solid-state drive. And that's not a surprise, because the top speed of the SATA 3 standard, which is currently the fastest standard for an internal storage controller in a consumer-grade computer, is just 6Gbps (768MBps).

On the other hand, USB 3.0 is slated to offer a speed of 5Gbps (640MBps), slightly slower than SATA 3 (6Gbps). This means you can use it to host just one internal drive without the drive being the bottleneck of the external storage device. And you don't have to worry that your computer's internal storage is the bottleneck, either, unless it runs a SATA 2-based drive.