Computer Ports

Here’s what I learnt about computer ports from the GEK1500 module. Some of the slower ports (legacy ports) are already being phased out and cannot be found in new computers due to the faster speeds of the other ports, especially the Universal Serial Bus port. Below is the list of some ports that are found in computers according to their data transfer speeds.



Serial Port 56 Kbps (legacy port) – normally used for slow speed modems (dialed-up), keyboard and mouse and PDA cradles



Bluetooth 1.2 – ~700 Kbps
Bluetooth 2.0 – ~2.1 Mbps

Used on mobile phones and other peripherals that do not have high power consumption

Pros: Conserve battery life as it uses very little power, do not require line of sight for devices to communicate with each other
Cons: Short range (depending on power can go up to only a few hundred metres), low data transfer rate (~700 Kbps), only faster than a serial port.

IrDA port – 4 Mbps – requires line of sight. Usually used in palm tops, mobile phones and some keyboards



Parallel port (legacy port)– several Mbps per sec up to 12 Mbps – Usually used to connect printers, can also used to connect zip drives and other old scanners and webcams



USB 1.1 - ~1.5 Mbps (Low Speed) ~12 Mbps (Full Speed) – can use to connect devices such as mouse, keyboards and webcams


A twisted pair CAT-3 or CAT-5 cable

Ethernet – 10-1000 Mbps – Use to connect computers to form a network to share resources, also use to connect to the internet via a router and to connect to a network printer



Firewire – 400 Mbps – Commonly use to transfer video files from digital camcorders, music from portable mp3 players, many pictures from digital camera and for other large file transfers. Also can be found on printers but rare. A faster standard called Firewire 800 with a speed of 800 Mbps also available which has twice the speed of the original Firewire 400.



A flashdrive, a typical USB mass storage device (storage capacities can range from a mere few 10s of MBs to today’s 2 GBs and above)

USB 2.0 – 480 Mbps – Commonly known as the Hi-speed USB port with data transfer rate up to 480 Mbps (60 MB/s). Used to transfer large video files and other multimedia files that require high speed transfer, from a digital camcorder or digital camera. Nowadays USB 2.0 ports are the most common and popular ports in computers and can be used to connect many devices such as keyboards, mouse, Ethernet cable, printers, external hardisk drives, and other peripheral devices.