Oh, how the USB standard has changed the world.  Gone are the days of finicky 9-pin serial port connections requiring proprietary driver installations that never seemed to work correctly.  Having thus far truly lived up to its name, the Universal Serial Bus standard has become as ubiquitous as the computer itself thanks to its ease of use, hot swappablility, and relatively high data transfer speeds.

While the specification for USB 3.0 was released in late 2008, few supporting products or software are available.  In June, Linux became the first operating system to support the new USB standard, creatively dubbed SuperSpeed USB.  Now, Freecom has announced production of the first external hard drive enclosure capable of harnessing the significantly higher data throughput rates offered by USB 3.0.  The Freecom Hard Drive XS 3.0 will support 3.5″ SATA drives with capacities up to 2TB and boasts built in 256-bit AES hardware encryption.  At under $200 with 1TB of included storage, the speeds by which the drive is capable of transferring data, due to USB 3.0, are stunning.

To fully understand how fast USB 3.0 is, an understanding of the existing ten year old USB 2.o capabilities, as well as those of competing data transfer methods such as FireWire and eSATA, is needed.  The chart below summarizes each technology’s abilities.

As shown, USB 3.0 is 10x faster than USB 2.0, and Freecom claims the drive can transfer “a 5GB movie in 38 seconds”.  This is more than just an incremental step forward in speed.  While new, faster eSATA and FireWire standards are on the horizon, for now USB 3.0 is the fastest data transfer scheme available in its class.  It’s an exciting standard that will surely advance the capabilities and productivity of the PC and its associated peripherals.