SuperSpeed USB Drive Prototype - Impressive, but Not Jaw Dropping

Readers who have extensive experience with USB storage probably know the early Hi-Speed USB hard drives weren't meeting user expectations (operating at 18-20MB/s in most cases) when they first debuted. In fact, it took nearly four years of chipset and controller tweaking for real-life benchmark to reach upwards of 30MB/s, which is still 50% shy of theoretical top speed, but at least data transfers can be completed in timely manner. Now the same thing is happening to USB 3.0 (aka. SuperSpeed USB); consumer joe shouldn't expect performance to jump tenfold, initially.

One of the first public demo of SuperSpeed USB hard drive prototype built by Seagate and Symwave showed read operations topping out at 165MB/s and write at 125MB/s. That's not shabby at all, considering the record for the fastest USB hard drive manages an impressive 39MB/s. The work-in-progress USB 3.0 drive is already 4 times the speed of a highly-optimized USB 2.0 product. A USB-IF representative emphasized that bandwidth is likely to improve for the first retail drive, but it remains to be seen whether the industry will need another four years to double the actual USB 3.0 rate to 300MB/s.