LucidPort USB 3.0 to SATA Bridge Breaks New Record

Lucidport brings another step closer to the first SuperSpeed USB gear with the USB 3.0 to SATA-II bridge. The world's first commercially USB 3.0 device links to native SATA-I/II storage whether it be a hard drive, solid state drive or Blu-ray burner and converts it into an external drive. Also unique is the support for USB Attached SCSI (UAS) driver in addition to traditional USB Mass Storage (MSC) driver compatibility. UAS is an overhaul of the current storage standard that will leverage SuperSpeed USB rate while providing some performance improvements for legacy USB 2.0 MSC devices.

To put this into perspective, LucidPort recorded 147MB/s for MSC protocol when interfacing to a PCIe x1 USB 3.0 host, which can be found on motherboard like the Asus P6X58. Switching to UAS protocol increased the speed to 173MB/s. In another test, connected to a native USB 3.0 host silicon, the MSC protocol managed 244MB/s while UAS hit 336MB/s, almost maxing out the limit of SATA-II. Other features include AES 128- and 256-bit hardware encryption and SATA native command queuing (NCQ) support.