First USB 3.0 thumb drive coming soon

Delivers speeds of up to 4.8GB/s

4 November 2009 17:21 GMT / By Duncan Geere

The USB 3.0 standard has been agreed upon and approved by its Promoter Group, we got the first driver for the platform, and now we're starting to see devices finally roll out that can cope with the new technology that's ten times faster than USB 2.0.

The first is a USB 3.0 thumb drive called the SuperSpeed USB 3.0 RAIDDRive, which will come in 32GB, 64GB and 128GB capacities. It's being produced by a company called Super Talent, which also makes USB 2.0 flash memory devices.

It's claimed that it can deliver speeds of up to 4.8Gbps (as opposed to 480Mbps theoretically possible with USB 2.0) but in the real world you're more likely to see speeds of more like 30MBps with 2.0, and around 200MBps in USB 3.0 mode. Still, that's a significant improvement.

The device measures 95 x 37 x 13.5mm and should be arriving at some point in December. Remember, though, that you'll need a driver for your OS, and a port that supports 3.0 to plug it into, before you'll get the blistering speeds you want. Intel chipsets won't be supporting USB 3.0 until 2011, so you'll need a discrete 3.0 controller to get things going.

In other words, we're still several years off 3.0 being as ubiquitous as 2.0 currently is.

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Full tags

Hardware, USB drives, USB 3, Intel, Super Talent, Flash drives

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