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Freecom outs first ever USB 3.0 hard drive
Mac users will just have to wait.
By John Dunn | Techworld
Published: 14:28 GMT, 24 September 09
After 8 years of success the USB 2.0 standard has begun its long journey into obsolescence. Dutch storage company Freecom has announced the first mainstream storage product based on ‘SuperSpeed' USB 3.0.
Buyers will be interested to hear that the new external Hard Drive XS 3.0 doesn't cost the earth at £99 (approx $160) for a 1TB drive, even though that excludes the £22.99 for a desktop PCI-bus controller necessary to make it work at its intended throughput. Laptop users can pair it with a £25.99 plug-in PC Card to achieve the same effect.
The company is also supplying drivers to make USB 3.0 work with Vista and XP. Windows 7 should have 'native' drivers from not long after launch, or users will hope so. Apple is not yet supported by the XS 3.0.
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As upgrades to 3.5 inch external drives go, this one looks like a good deal. USB 3.0 boosts the theoretical data throughput of USB storage devices to 4.8Gbit/s from USB 2.0's now rather tardy-sounding 480Mbit/s. Even taking in account protocol overhead, that should still dramatically reduce data transfer times at a moment when larger files sizes are starting to become commonplace.
"We now can transfer a 5GB movie in just 38 seconds - it's unbelievably fast," said Freecom's managing director, Axel Lucassen. Assuming that USB 3.0 scales proportionately, USB 2.0 would have transferred the same file in six and a half minutes.
Lucassen also put his finger on another application that should be boosted by the arrival of USB 3.0, namely transparent encryption. "The Hard Drive XS 3.0 also outperforms the competition in terms of security. Our USB 3.0 solution will have high-speed hardware encryption with AES 256 bit - this is not only the fastest but also the safest storage solution on the market," he said.
Built-in encryption is a well-kept secret of many of Freecom's portable external hard drives, but the technology has struggled to fulfil its promise due to worries over throughput. External hard drives using integrated encryption have a deserved reputation for being slow, and the interface is one factor in that.
USB 3.0 is designed to have other advantages such as the ability to power more powerful devices straight off the SuperSpeed bus, getting round the need for a power adaptor for certain classes of device. Power draw is one of the reasons why external SATA hard drives have never taken off. USB 3.0 can also cut power drain when those devices are not in use.
More generally, to permeate every type of computing device, USB 3.0 will need native support at OS level. That is the point of USB of whatever generation. Users can plug in a range of devices and they will just work without extra software being a necessity. Having to load a driver for every USB interface or device is clearly no more than a stop-gap solution.
As far as storage goes, it's been the ‘3.0 week' all round, Seagate having announced the first SATA 3.0 hard drive designed to raise internal hard drive bus performance.
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perlgeek | Published: 22:12 GMT, 25 September 2009
Feh! I am waiting for "Ludicrous Speed" drives.
Rod | Published: 15:16 GMT, 25 September 2009
It's called SATA 6.0gbps not SATA 3.0 There is no such thing as "SATA 3" however SATA 3.0 gbps has been out for a long time.
Robert | Published: 12:58 GMT, 25 September 2009
Freecom isn't Dutch. The company's German.
John | Published: 09:48 GMT, 25 September 2009
To all the firewire fans, yes, it's a nice technology but USB has won that battle in the mainstream. USB 3.0 isn't just a signalling upgrade, the controllers have been re-designed so many of the drawbacks of USB 2.0 have been addressed. USB 3.0 is more akin to etherenet now.
James | Published: 08:30 GMT, 25 September 2009
"just like fw400 beat usb2 by miles (and we don't even need to mention what fw800 did to usb2), fw1600/3200 will beat usb3 with the same margin." erm someone needs to learn math fw3200 = 3.2GBps < 4.8GBps of USB3. Having had FW400 and FW800 external drives, I never saw a difference over USB since they became drive limited - only caveat to this is arrays and some of the new drives with big buffers but that makes no difference with large files (most of mine are in the 500MB range)
Blake | Published: 03:22 GMT, 25 September 2009
What bus is USB3 connected to in a PC? PCI express 1x is 2.5gbps, slower than USB. Not that it matters much. We'll see what the real-world numbers look like once the checksums & latency have been taken into account...
Also Anon Y. Mous | Published: 02:07 GMT, 25 September 2009
firewire 800 isn't even 800MBits/s and your comparing that to 4.8Gbits/s. Another Mac user who never passed basic math?
yochai | Published: 01:07 GMT, 25 September 2009
No mention of the fact that only the linux kernel currently supports USB 3.0...
joshua | Published: 22:47 GMT, 24 September 2009
just like fw400 beat usb2 by miles (and we don't even need to mention what fw800 did to usb2), fw1600/3200 will beat usb3 with the same margin.
Markus | Published: 22:42 GMT, 24 September 2009
something people should be aware of... USB2 never reaches its raw datarate during file transfers. it reaches circa 50% for "user throughput" with the best USB2 controllers available today. USB3 builds on the same architecture, just higher clockrate, and will suffer from the same problem. other fundamentally different interfaces/protocols, like firewire, will always give better "end-user performance"; the raw datarate means nothing for the end result when it comes to USB.