USB 3 Chip Will Bring RAID to External Drives
Symwave, one of the first companies to design silicon for USB 3.0, is revealing more details about its SOC (system on a chip) using the high-speed standard at the Hot Chips conference on Monday.
USB 3.0, which debuted last November, is designed to provide throughput as high as 5GB per second (Gbps), up from just 480Mbps for USB 2.0. Symwave says its USB 3.0 SOC can be used in external storage devices that ship data as fast as 500MB per second.
Symwave is trying to tackle the same problem plaguing many consumers and enterprises as they use more high-definition multimedia content and have to save more data in general. Demand for storage capacity continues to rise, and backing up that data from a laptop or desktop to an external drive can take hours. USB 2.0, nearly ubiquitous on PCs and portable consumer electronics today, can be a barrier.
