Take a good look at your USB cable: if you see this color, it hides a hidden and very useful feature.
The USB standard quickly became established as a standard in the world of computing and connected devices. Nowadays, everyone can recognize a USB port or cable, as they are so useful for connecting numerous devices.
Many USB cable owners are unaware that these types of connections sometimes have a specific color code. Try it out at home and look inside the ports or connectors to find colors like white, blue, or orange. While for many these colors are purely aesthetic, they sometimes indicate hidden functions that prove very useful in everyday life.
If you look in your drawer full of USB cables, chances are most of them are either colorless or have a small black tab inside the connector. These are the most common USB cables and support USB 2.0. This standard ensures compatibility with a vast majority of devices, but doesn't offer very high transfer speeds (up to 480 Mbps). In short: a black or colorless cable won't allow you to transfer your files very quickly.
Note that white cables also exist, but these correspond to USB 1.0 and are therefore even slower. Conversely, the transition to USB 3.0 was marked by the introduction of blue cables. This standard allows for a much higher transfer speed compared to 2.0 cables, reaching speeds of approximately 4.8 Gb of data per second.
But the ultimate choice is clearly distinguished by a USB cable with a red or orange connector. A cable with a red connector indicates that it supports USB 3.1 or 3.2, allowing it to handle data transfer speeds of up to 10 to 20 Gb/s! This should allow you to transfer your largest files much faster than with a black, white, or blue cable. Note, however, that many manufacturers no longer differentiate between the red, yellow, and orange colors, which we will now discuss.
While the orange (or yellow) USB cable only supports the USB 3.0 standard, this still translates to a transfer speed of approximately 5 Gb/s. This remains fast, but it also conceals another feature: cables with orange connectors are "always on." Little known and used by the general public, these cables allow you to continuously charge your devices even when they are switched off. In practical terms, you could connect a device to your computer while it's off using an orange cable, and the cable would remain powered on to charge your device.
In addition to these codes, the use of colors on a USB cable connector is also intended to be practical: it allows you to instinctively see which way to insert your cable into your connector by distinguishing the two edges of the latter!
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