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When SSD and USB 3.0 Come Together

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the you-got-stick-in-my-drive dept.

An anonymous reader writes "USB flash drives have been a quiet revolution in computing. Their rise broke the death grip that the floppy drive had on the PC industry, and smaller capacity models have become cheap, disposable means of data transport and distribution. Yet while you can pick up a 4GB model for less than the price of a meal, large capacity drives are still prohibitively expensive. Meanwhile, solid state drives (SSDs) also utilize flash memory, but masquerade as mechanical hard drives rather than USB storage devices. Now it seems the two technologies are bashing into each other, with this article pointing to OCZ's new Enyo USB 3.0 SSD — a rather curious beast that looks like a thin external hard drive and connects via USB, but houses an SSD inside."

4 of 158 comments (clear)

  1. USB 3.0? by Yvan256 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    What about Light Peak? Why upgrade to a minor speed bump when the next available speed bump is hundreds of times faster?

    Light Peak has enough bandwidth to replace USB 2.0, FireWire 800, DVI/HDMI, Ethernet 1000... all at once, on the first revision no less. Will USB 3.0 ever take off?

    1. Re:USB 3.0? by CAIMLAS · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Light Peak, if it actually comes out as specified, looks like it will be an awesome advancement: it'll change datacenter storage, home storage, and pretty much everything else overnight.

      The crux will be how it's licensed and how it's designed: will it be licensed like USB (ie, liberally) or like Firewire (ie, barely)? Will it be designed to allow for people to abuse the specifications (ie, USB) and still work, or will it be painfully restrictive, allowing only "good" devices to work (ie, Firewire)?

      If it behaves as an interface and costs like USB, it'll fly off the shelves, I think. I'm hoping so, and looking forward to it. But, frankly, I can see it becoming the future equivalent of something like iSCSI or FC: too awesome and capable for the consumer, and it's got such an incredible profit margin we're going to keep it Enterprisey.

      --
      ~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
  2. Re:Oh, please. by somersault · · Score: 2, Interesting

    You can fit various OSes onto a floppy disk, that doesn't mean that floppies have a large capacity. It's all relative. These days I can barely fit a quarter of my music collection into 16GB, but for me 16GB is the sweet cost/size point for USB devices at the moment.

    --
    which is totally what she said
  3. Re:Title says USB 3.0 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    My question is why bother with USB 3.0? The only practical purpose for those transfer speeds is for an external SSD. These drives are already using SATA, and the external drive enclosures are just converting to USB anyway. Why not cut out a layer of conversion and just go with e-SATA? Ports for e-SATA are already here, and external hard drives are already using them. You're going to have to add ports to your system anyway when USB 3.0 comes out (and if you're really unlucky, get a motherboard that can handle said ports). Just add an e-SATA port, which will hook right into the SATA slot that's been on all motherboards from the past 6+ years.