WD & NEC Working on USB SCSI Protocol Driver for Future SuperSpeed SSDs

There could be some delay in mass adoption of USB 3.0, largely due to Intel pushing USB 3.0 integration into its southbridge to 2011. That doesn't stop rest of the industry from going after this huge connectivity market. Western Digital and NEC have jointly announced the two are going to push the envelope even further with a USB Attached SCSI Protocol (UASP) driver that they claim to fully leverage the SuperSpeed USB transfer rate while giving a moderate boost for legacy USB 2.0 mass storage devices.

The UASP is a complete MSC back-compatible replacement for current USB Mass Storage class as well as Bulk Only Transfers (BOT). For it to work, UASP must be implemented on both host and device. That's why NEC and WD are collaborating on this. It's logical to believe that when the time is right, WD will debut a USB 3.0 SSD, which is perhaps the only application that needs UASP to flex its muscles. The current fastest USB 3.0 drive to date is LaCie 2Big, hitting 275MB/s when in RAID 0 mode.

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