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USB Ports: Gray, Blue, Yellow, or Red?
4 August 2016 | by Did you know that the different colored USB ports on your computer aren’t just for decoration? That the colors actually mean something?
What? You’ve just been plugging USB cables into whichever port is most convenient? What a rookie mistake! 🙂
Well, some ports are a whole lot better than others, and some even do cool things that you probably didn’t know about.
Gray/Black USB Ports
These are your run-of-the-mill USB 1.0/2.0 ports. They have throughput ranging from 1.5 Mbit/s to 480 Mbit/s in later versions.
Blue USB Ports
These are newer USB 3.0 ports. They range from 5 Gbit/s (USB 3.0) to 10 Gbit/s (USB 3.1). These are the better choice for devices that require faster speeds.
Yellow (or Red) USB Ports
These are called “sleep-and-charge” ports, meaning that they continue to supply power even when the computer is sleeping. This makes it convenient to charge a phone or tablet from your laptop battery.
Just as a side note, I’ve had computers that required me to enable this feature in settings before it would work.
Note: Most of the time white USB ports are USB 1.0, but some manufacturers use them for USB 3.0 ports.
So, next time you go to plug in a USB device that requires fast throughput, double check that you’re using the fastest port available on your computer!
9 Responses to “USB Ports: Gray, Blue, Yellow, or Red?”
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Thanks, that information was helpful.
I only knew about the black and the blue USB ports
73 Bob
Even as I continuing “maturing” it is very good to continue to learn something new all the time.
Thanks much.
Ohhh darn, now I have to crawl under the desk and look.
Good advice, though possibly some of the yellows are being used as electrical “vampires”, charging items that don’t need it all the time. It would be good to check.
Learn something new even at this old age of 73, thanks for posting.
For USB 3 ports, not all manufacturers are using blue. Take a look at the little “trident” icon by the port. Just the icon is usually USB2.0. The icon with “SS” is USB3.0 and the icon with SS and “10” in the upper right is USB 3.1.
This is also a very useful chart over on Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB#Host_and_device_interface_receptacles
thanks for the info but i wanted to know what the colors of my usb thumb drives mean
Keith u dumbasss no one is gonna answer you this…. post is from 2016. You’re a LITTLE bit late there buddy. I’d say try google 🙂 Add me on habbo hotel: XzXxSn1p3rxXzX
Thank you