Do I really need it?
I'm looking to upgrade my tincan and I can't decide if I want to pay extra for it or just ditch it and save some money on the motherboard. I'm worried that if I were to buy a mobo with usb 3.0 i wouldn't really use it much.

Depends really. Do you copy data across your USB connections? External hard disks, memory sticks etc... And if you do, would you like that to be a lot faster?

Imho, it's a non issue. USB 3.0 peripherals still work on 2.0 ports, and USB 2.0 peripherals work on 3.0 ports.

Still I'd be cautious about a MB featuring only usb 2.0 ports as even entry range MBs tend to feature usb 3.0 compatibility. Do you have a specific model in view?

What Crispy said, basically. Unless you do a lot of file shuffling onto flash or external HD drives (that are 3.0 compliant, naturally) it might come in handy, but otherwise there aren't that many devices that would make much use of it... yet. It wouldn't hurt to future-proof yourself though.

That said, when I bought my current external HDD, which I use for my GOG backups, that has USB 3.0 I only purchased it because for what I got it was cheaper than the others in comparison. I'm glad it worked out that way though. Transfer speeds were the usual so-so on my older lappie with its 2.0 ports so large files took a while to copy, while on my new lappie which only has 3.0 it made a dramatic leap with it having general transfer speeds are up to ~60MB/s on average. In addition, I can easily install straight from my plugged in external HDD at comparative speeds to what I would get if I had it sitting on my laptop's drive - on 2.0 it was still faster to copy the files back on to my PC and then install them rather than installing directly from the external.

So, yeah.

I've never noticed it was that much faster. Maybe I'm just an impatient bastard ;p

Trust me. It's a huge step up.

I do notice the difference in speed between 2.0 and 3.0. So, if money is not an issue, I'd say go for it.

Are you sure the device you used supported 3.0, or you weren't using an USB 2.0 hub connected to a USB 3.0 port? There is a definite speed increase, at least in cases where speed matters (like copying gigabytes of files to an external USB hard drive).

Having said that, my experiences with USB 3.0 haven't been that rosy (I have two laptops with USB 3.0 ports). At least earlier it seemed rather flaky, possibly due to piss-poor USB 3.0 drivers. If I was e.g. copying 100 gigabytes of big files from one USB 3.0 hard drive to another, quite often the copying would fail quite soon, as if the USB port would "reset" itself after awhile, it would lose the USB device etc.

Reading about it online, quite many complained about buggy USB 3.0 drivers on e.g. their Windows 7 systems, they had to download better drivers from Intel homepages directly etc. I did that too, unsure if it really improved that much.

So in the end, I do most of the heavy use actually through USB 2.0 ports (or a USB 2.0 hub which is connected to a USB 3.0 port), because they just feel more dependable at this point. I rather do the copying slower, if it doesn't tend to fail.

So currently it is kinda silly that I use USB 3.0 ports for USB speakers, mouse and gamepads (things that don't need the extra speed), but my 2 terabyte USB hard drives are connected to an USB 2.0 hub. :)

USB 3.0 is VERY fast, Once you use it you will instantly realize just how slow 2.0 was.
And it does not cause data transfer errors EVER.

Yes you need 3.0 if you plan to move gigs of information.

Oh i remembered USB 1.5. Expert slow casted on golem :D