When SSD and USB 3.0 Come Together

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."

Comments

USB 3.0?

[Yvan256]

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?

Re:USB 3.0?

[CAIMLAS]

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.

Re:Oh, please.

[somersault]

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.