The First Ever USB 3.0 Hard Drive

Dutch storage company Freecom has announced the first mainstream storage product called Hard Drive XS 3.0 based on USB 3.0. The company is also supplying drivers to make USB 3.0 work with Vista and XP. Windows 7 should have 'native' drivers from not long after launch, or users will hope so. Apple is not yet supported by the XS 3.0.

Buyers will be interested to hear that the new external Hard Drive XS 3.0 doesn't cost the earth at £99 (approx $160) for a 1TB drive, even though that excludes the £22.99 for a desktop PCI-bus controller necessary to make it work at its intended throughput. Laptop users can pair it with a £25.99 plug-in PC Card to achieve the same effect.

Lucassen also put his finger on another application that should be boosted by the arrival of USB 3.0, namely transparent encryption. "The Hard Drive XS 3.0 also outperforms the competition in terms of security. Our USB 3.0 solution will have high-speed hardware encryption with AES 256 bit - this is not only the fastest but also the safest storage solution on the market," he said.

USB 3.0 is designed to have other advantages such as the ability to power more powerful devices straight off the SuperSpeed bus, getting round the need for a power adaptor for certain classes of device. Power draw is one of the reasons why external SATA hard drives have never taken off. USB 3.0 can also cut power drain when those devices are not in use.

More generally, to permeate every type of computing device, USB 3.0 will need native support at OS level. That is the point of USB of whatever generation. Users can plug in a range of devices and they will just work without extra software being a necessity. Having to load a driver for every USB interface or device is clearly no more than a stop-gap solution.