USB 3.0

LAS VEGAS--At CES 2011, Verbatim introduces a series of peripherals to arm travelers with digital tools to complement a digital lifestyle. The first two products are hard drives: the Titan XS SuperSpeed 3.0 external hard drive wrapped in a shock-proof rubber enclosure for twice the toughness and 10 times the transfer speed of traditional USB 2.0.

The other HDD is the Store 'n" Go SuperSpeed that has onboard connections for USB 3.0 and FireWire 800. It's also compatible with Macs right out of the box thanks to the HFS+ formatting. Unfortunately, the capacity for both … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Just a day after Seagate announced what's arguably the most compact portable hard drive, the GoFlex Slim, the record is now broken by what Verbatim announced today, the Titan XS SuperSpeed USB 3.0.

While it's hard to put in numbers how much smaller the Titan XS is, I've seen them both and it is indeed smaller--though admittedly not by much.

The Titan XS is a rugged portable drive, though not nearly as rugged as the ioSafe Rugged Portable. Like the name suggests, it supports SuperSpeed USB 3.0 (5Gbps) and is housed in a shock-resistant … Read more

LAS VEGAS--I reviewed the Lacie FastKey a month ago and thought it was as compact as a portable drive could be. I was proven wrong today.

Verbatim announced at CES 2011 its own version of a portable drive that's based on a solid-state drive. It's called the Verbatim USB 3.0 External SSD. It is even smaller than the FastKey and offers up to 128GB of storage (as opposed to 120GB that the  FastKey has).

Verbatim says this new ultra-slim portable drive supports transfer rates of up to 190MB/sec when used with the USB 3.0 … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Eight months after releasing its first USB 3.0 external hard drive, the MiniStation Cobalt, which was also one of the first on the market, Buffalo showed off today at CES 2011 a comprehensive family of external storage solutions based on the high-speed USB 3.0 connectivity.

USB 3.0 is the next generation of USB connectivity that's slated to replace, and is backward-compatible, with USB 2.0. USB 3.0 has a ceiling speed of 5Gbps, which is about 10 times the speed of of USB 2.0, which caps at 480Mbps. It's likely that most … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Here's a question we're interested in seeing answered over the next few months: will the 21-inch, $799.99 MSI WindTop AE2210 and its 2.7GHz Intel Core i5 2500s outperform one of the many similarly priced mainstream PCs from HP that have stuck with multicore AMD CPUs?

In truth, we suspect HP is savvy enough to manage its pricing accordingly, and while it is offering some AMD-based Pavilion Elite midtower PCs, it also has a few Sandy Bridge models of its own in that product line.

Still, we're curious to see what happens across the mainstream … Read more

We can't say we like the busy design of MSI's new 23.6-inch WindTop AE2410 all-in-one, but it has some intriguing features, and starts at a reasonable price.

For $899 when it comes out later this quarter, the AE2410 will offer Intel's new Core i7 2630QM mobile Sandy Bridge CPU. You can opt for a discrete graphics card upgrade with this system, but its integrated Intel HD graphics core on the CPU may provide enough basic gaming and home entertainment capability for casual consumers. We'll know more once we can test a few of these mainstream … Read more

What do you get when you put solid-state storage, USB 3.0 connectivity, and a thumb-size design together? Well, you'll get LaCie's FastKey.

This is a unique portable storage solution that uses the fastest technology in terms of storage type (solid state) and peripheral connectivity (USB 3.0). On top of that, the device is about the size of a large thumb drive but offers up to 120GB of storage space.

Unfortunately, for the quite obvious reasons stated above (namely is high-end functionality), it isn't cheap; the LaCie FastKey costs $475 for the 120GB version. The drive … Read more

A technology developed by Intel and backed by Apple is expected to appear earlier than previously thought, paving the way for very-high-speed connections on both PCs and Macs.

Light Peak is now on track to appear in products in the first half of 2011--and likely earlier in the year than later, according to an industry source familiar with the progress of the technology. Light Peak--proposed as an underlying protocol that will host other protocols like USB or DisplayPort--will carry data at 10 gigabits per second in both directions simultaneously.

Apple is expected to back Light Peak, if past comments from Intel still hold. Shortly after its annual developer conference in 2009, Intel said that it had showed the technology to third parties, got feedback, then incorporated the feedback into the next design, adding, at that time, that "Apple is an innovating force in the industry." (Apple has reportedly claimed that it conceived the idea for Light Peak.)

If Apple implements Light Peak, it would be a safe bet that the company will have a lot to say about the technology--maybe with a catchy name in tow. And it would probably not be wild speculation to say that Apple would want to be the first to use it.

An Intel demonstration in 2009 at its developer conference used a machine running Apple's Mac OS X.… Read more

Iomega today announced its--and possibly the world's--first portable storage solution that's based on a solid-state drive (SSD), the Iomega External USB 3.0 SSD Flash Drive.

Traditionally, most portable drives are based on internal laptop (2.5-inch) hard drives. As the name suggests, the new drive also supports USB 3.0, which offers a ceiling speed of up to 5Gbps.

According to Iomega, the new SSD Flash Drive features built-in 256-bit hardware encryption and rugged housing, and is bus-powered, meaning it uses only one USB cable for both data and power connections.

Iomega claims that the new drive'… Read more