Rotac Systems' USB 3.0 PCI-E & ExpressCard Hit Japan

Early adopters wanting to try USB 3.0 now have another upgrade path other than replacing the motherboard with Asus P6X58. Ratoc Systems from Japan has leaked out two cards adding two SuperSpeed USB ports to a PC.

The REX-PEU3 is a PCI Express 1x internal card for desktop computer; with a 4-pin auxiliary power jack, the PCI-E card can supply a maximum of 900mA current to each port. The REX-EXU3 is a ExpressCard/34 intended for laptops, but like older USB 2.0 cards, you will need to connect the bundled AC adapter to provide enough power for external drives. According to Ratoc, one can expect close to 200MB/s when transferring from a USB 3.0-to-SATA drive to a PC and about 155MB/s when writing files to the same HDD. Granted, that all depends on the bridge chip efficiency as well as the SATA drive performance.