Almost exactly a year ago, on the 17th of November 2008, the third version of the USB specification (USB 3.0) was made available to the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF). Effectively, this meant the specification was opened to hardware manufacturers to implement it in their products.

One year later, the first thumb drive using the USB 3.0 specification has been announced and is ready to be released into the wild.
Manufactured SuperTalent, the drive is available in both 32 and 128GB capacities and is slightly larger than your regular thumb drive.

It doesn’t look like much, but the website tells us the list of features:

Note that MB/sec is Mega Bytes per second, not Mega bits. And that is fast.

You get transfer speeds of 200 Megabytes/sec on a standard USB 3.0 port and upto 320 Megabytes/sec with a special UAS Protocol driver.

Will my computer support it?

You’re going to need a USB 3.0 host controller to do any USB 3.0 stuff (like this one. And if you don’t, then it transfers data at USB 2.1 speeds.

All that apart, your operating system has got to support it too. If you’re not using the latest version of the Linux kernel, then you don’t get USB 3.0 support..
Linux is the first (and so far, the only) kernel that supports it.

Windows will add support for it as a service pack or an update for Windows 7, perhaps even later on this month.
Apple, however, has not even mentioned USB 3.0 (nothing new here!)

The latest version of the Linux kernel hasn’t hit the major distributions, like Ubuntu or Fedora yet, but some of the rolling release type distros, like Gentoo would carry the latest kernel.

USB 3.0 support is there, but there being only one device in the market, it’s not very popular as yet. And as more devices get launched, we can be sure to expect motherboards with built-in USB 3.0 controllers and kernel builds that make it really easy to add USB support before the next Ubuntu (9.10) is released after six months.

Is the drive available now?

Not right away, but it is slated to hit the shelves this December (next month).
View their press release here and you can register for email updates about USB products here.

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