OCZ to Deliver USB 3.0 SSD’s in 2010

S-ATA 3.0 and USB 3.0 are brand-new technologies, but both are readily available for the end-consumer to take advantage of right now. Of course, there’s a lot more than just having the ability to use either technology though, such as having actual product to take advantage of them. The releases up to now have been slow, with most storage solutions being high-end offerings, but OCZ issued a release yesterday that boasts its support for USB 3.0 (S-ATA 3.0 is also in its cards, though).

The company has partnered with Symwave, a fabless semiconductor company specializing in the design of SoCs (system-on-a-chip), which include USB 3.0 controllers, to deliver the company’s first USB 3.0-based SSDs. No images are available at this time, which is the reason I’m showing off the company’s Vertex SSD below in its place. There’s no performance information available in the press release, as it looks like both companies are going to hold off until CES to reveal all of the details.

Because USB 3.0 far exceeds the bandwidth limitations of USB 2.0, such storage devices would revitalize the meaning of mobile data. USB thumb drives typically top out at 30MB/s read and 25MB/s write, and that’s for lower-densities. With USB 3.0 SSD drives, the speeds delivered would be on par with actually having the SSD installed in your machine, and current consumer SSDs on the market wouldn’t currently be able to saturate the USB 3.0 bus (5Gbit/s), so the future is looking good.

It’s unknown when OCZ will be bringing such drives to market, but you could likely expect launch models to be relatively on-par with the densities we see today on high-end thumb drives, 32GB, 64GB or higher. But depending on how long the launch will take from this point, pricing might be much improved by then, so it might be common to see drives at that point with a much higher density, but not a break-the-bank price tag. Either way, I can’t wait to get a glimpse of or even test out one of these babies.

“Thanks to Symwave’s industry leading USB 3.0 storage controller, our external SSD device delivers 10x the transfer rate of USB 2.0 at 5Gb/s, as well as several ‘green’ improvements including superior power management and lower CPU utilization,” said Eugene Chang, Vice President of Product Management at the OCZ Technology Group. “We are determined to be at the forefront of the market by offering products with unparalleled performance, reliability, and design to unleash the potential of flash-based storage.”