Super Talent to ship its first USB 3.0 flash drives this week

[Matthew DeCarlo]

According to DailyTech, Super Talent will begin shipping its RAIDDrive USB 3.0 flash drives this week. The series uses "multiple pairs of differential serial data lines technology" and boasts transfer speeds of 200MB/s via USB 3.0 or up to 320MB/s using a UAS Protocol driver. Super Talent plans to offer drives in 32, 64 and 128GB capacities, but only a few thousand 64GB units will be available to boot.

The 64GB model will debut at a price of about $400, while the 32GB and 128GB variants should cost around $300 and $650 -- the inevitable early adopter tax. If that's outside your budget, the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show (CES) will surely entice other memory companies like OCZ and Corsair to unveil their SuperSpeed USB goods. Granted, their prices will also be high, but competition eventually works wonders.

Unfortunately, Intel is taking its time with cranking out USB 3.0-ready southbridges. In the meantime, motherboard makers will have to rely on third party controllers. It's also safe to assume that various expansion cards with USB 3.0 ports will soon be available, which should allow older systems to adopt the new technology cheaply.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/37256-super-talent-to-ship-its-first-usb-30-flash-drives-this-week.html

 

[lfg18]

Wow that's a lot of money for an USB drive, i think i will wait until prices come to a reasonable rate, anyway you need to get a PC with USB 3.0, otherwise it will be useless, and also all of your friends and your computer lab, and the new plasma TV you just got and... well lets better wait until this tech catches up

 

[Guest]

I totally agree with lfg18 - that's just way too much money. Plus, most of us, most of the times, just don't need more than 8-16 gigs of memory in our pockets...

And that's all without notes about usb 3 and how little support in devices it has.

 

[compdata]

It is a lot of money, but this is basically a mini SSD drive with Raid controller. Not something i need in an external format, but it is an interesting proposition.

 

[LightHeart]

The USB is a lot of money and I don't have any computers with USB 3.0 yet, so I'll have to wait until both change. In the mean time ESATA is pretty nice for external HDs and USB 2.0 is cheap and fast enough for now.

 

[Guest]

Very cool and the will be common place in a few years. But for now, it's useless to most people. Sure some people have true needs, but most only want that new toy, lol. The thing is you will transfer very quickly out off of your new USB 3.0 computer to this memory only to see that 99.9% of the computers around you only have USB 2.0. So maybe you save on one side but not the other. And then you must consider when you really need something that fast. On a USB 2 stick I can transfer an entire DVD movie in only 2.5 minutes. But again, it depends on what the need is. Even restoring my 12GB partition only takes about 7 or 8 minutes on usb 2. I guess you could use it somehow to boost swap file speed, or do some trick if kept on the same usb 3 computer. But in the real world of transfer, it won't do much. It will be more common in 1 to 3 years and also much cheaper.