First Consumer USB 3.0 Hard Drive from Germans

Freecom from Germany couldn't wait any longer to release its USB Hard Drive XS 3.0 which is, as you may have guessed, the first retail SuperSpeed USB storage. Granted, there aren't any motherboards nor built-in OS drivers available, but Freecom has USB 3.0 cards for both laptop and desktop PCs, and these come with proprietary drivers.

Aimed squarely at consumer users, external drive offers speeds of up to 130MBytes/s (or 1040Mb/s); in comparison, the fastest USB 2.0 drive maxes out at 40MBytes/s (or 320Mb/s). Better silicons both for SATA bridge and host will emerge to further improve throughput so it's likely performance of future USB 3.0 drives will double. The Hard Drive XS 3.0 also sports hardware encryption with AES 256-bit strength. Freecom expects to ship the 3.5" SuperSpeed USB drive in mid-November starting at 1TB for £99.99; the USB 3.0 PCIe card and ExpressCard will hit retail the same time for £23 and £26 respectively.