NewsExclusive: First USB 3.0 and SATA 6.0 Expansion Card, Will Sell For $30

Posted 10/30/09 at 02:45:07 PM by Gordon Mah Ung

If you were bummed like most of us that Intel’s shiny new P55 chipset didn’t include USB 3.0 and SATA 6.0 support, Asus's new U3S6 should make you happy.

For a mere 30 smackers, the U3S6 card gives you two USB 3.0 ports and two SATA 6.0 ports in a PCI-E card. The card has three primary components:  an NEC D720200F1 USB 3.0 controller, a Marvell 88SE9123 SATA 6.0 controller, and a PLX PEX8613. The PLX part is the same chip the company uses on its SATA6 boards to helps ameliorate a problem with the P55 chipset.

 

More photos, details and our analysis after the jump!

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NewsUSB 3.0 makes USB RAID Possible, Tempting

Posted 08/28/09 at 02:25:35 PM by Andy Salisbury

According to some recent news, one of the first companies creating silicon for USB 3.0 is claiming that one of their USB 3.0 systems on a chip can be used in concert with external storage devices to provide transfer rates of up to 500Mbit/second.

USB 3.0 has been designed to handle transfer speeds of to 5Gbit/second, a sizeable increase when compared to the 480Mbit/second that USB 2.0 offers. “You’re pretty much communicating through a straw,” stated Gideon Intrater, vice president of solutions architecture with Symwave. “USB 2 was good as long as you had 100GB on your hard drive, but now it’s just way too slow.”

The new system on a chip, which was developed with external storage in mind, can supposedly offer performance faster than SATA. According to reports, said chip will allow speeds as high as 500Mbit/second thanks to its RAID 0 support. System builders will be able to take advantage of this feature by installing two external drives that can be addressed at the same time, offering faster data reads.

Still, we’re going to have to wait for USB 3.0 to make its debut.

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