Power Quotient International (PQI) has unveiled its first devices with USB 3.0 interface. The innovative interconnection technology will accelerate performance of two external hard drives as well as new USB 3.0 flash memory sticks.

PQI’s Cool Drive U366 is one of the few USB 3.0 flash storage devices on the market, and it features read speed up to 97MB/s, which is four to five times higher compared to conventional high-performance USB 2.0 flash drives. The PQI Cool Drive U366 will be available in 16GB, 32GB and 64GB capacities.

Earlier this year Super Talent Technology unveiled its USB 3.0 RAIDDrives flash memory sticks that deliver transfer speeds up to 200MB/s only in USB 3.0 ports, moreover, using a separate UAS Protocol driver with a USB 3.0 port this SuperSpeed drive can reach up to 320MB/s transfer speeds.

Last week PQI announced two 2.5” USB 3.0 external drives, H566 hard disk drive (2.5”, 5400rpm, 8MB cache, read speed up to 105MB/s and up to 99.9MB/s write speed, 320/500/640GB capacities) and S533 solid-state drive (2.5”, maximum read speed of 274MB/s and maximum 198MB/s write speed, 80GB and 160GB capacities).

USB 3.0 is capable of supporting data transfer rates of up to 5Gb/s (625MB/s), which is 10 times faster than the previous high-speed USB 2.0 transfer speeds. At present there are very few mainboards equipped with standalone universal serial bus 3.0 controllers that can take advantage of USB 3.0 devices. It is projected that mainstream core-logic set will get SuperSpeed USB support only in 2011, hence, devices with improved interface will hardly get too popular until then.

Tags: PQI, USB, Flash