USB 3.0 on the way

Stephen Withers
Monday, 21 September 2009 13:14

Your IT - Home IT

"SuperSpeed may eventually move beyond those target applications requiring the highest bandwidth," said In-Stat analyst Brian O'Rourke.

"However, in order to achieve broader adoption, cost will have to go down significantly," he added. "To get SuperSpeed USB costs down and increase attach rates, the technology will have to be integrated into the application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), and System-on-a-Chips (SoCs), that power the peripherals."

In related news, LucidPort Technology announced today that it will demonstrate fully-functional SuperSpeed storage devices at this week's Intel Developers Forum.

The drives will be from Netac, MacPower, Good Way Technology, and SSI, and will use LucidPort's USB300 USB 3.0 to SATA bridge chip. The products expected to reach the market before the end of the year.

According to LucidPort officials, the SuperSpeed drives will transfer up to 250MBps, which can be as much as 10 times faster than current USB 2.0 drives.

"The market expects USB 3.0 to be fast," said Reid Augustin, VP, product development at LucidPort. "The USB300 meets that challenge by making the full SATA bandwidth accessible from USB."

The new SuperSpeed drives will be backward-compatible with existing mass storage drivers for Windows, Linux and Mac OS, and with USB 2.0 and 1.1 host controllers LucidPort officials claimed. The performance of those legacy ports will be the limiting factor.

We've had Full-Speed USB (12Mbps), Hi-Speed USB (480Mbps), and now SuperSpeed USB (4.8Gbps), so what's the next generation going to be called? MegaSpeed? UltraSpeed?