Super Talent’s USB 3.0 Thumb Drive Gets Firmware Upgrade [RAIDDrive, The World's First USB 3.0 Thumb Drive Gets Updated With Better Transfer Speeds]

Posted on TFTS by Steve Anderson on Friday, 26. November 2010 under: Computers & Computing, Hard Disks & Solid State Drives, USB Devices

Well folks, color me all nice and dazzled–the crew who brought out the world’s first USB 3.0 thumb drive, the RAIDDrive from Super Talent, has now added a firmware upgrade that’s going to do some really impressive things to its transfer rate.

Remember how, yesterday, I thought it was a great thing that Buffalo was bringing out thumb drives with 71 meg per second transfer rates? Well, Super Talent’s RAIDDrive is about to make that benchmark look sick by offering up–get ready for this–370 meg per second.

We’re talking about pushing half gigabyte ranges, folks. If you had an internet connection that went at 370 meg per second you’d be weeping with joy possibly to the point of dehydration.This is sufficiently fast, just for a point of reference, to transfer the entire contents of a DVD in something under 15 seconds if I’m doing the math right.

As it turns out, their RAIDDrive, the world’s first USB 3.0 drive I mentioned, was actually capable of these speeds all along, but due to the USB controllers available at the time it was released, it was throttled down to about 300 meg per second. Now, with the second generation of USB 3.0 controllers coming out, the firmware on the RAIDDrive is getting that upgrade to let the full power of the RAIDDrive be fully realized.

Some have raised concerns, however, that the RAIDDrive already runs pretty warm–temperature-wise–and raising the transfer rate might well make an already hot piece of hardware even hotter…like maybe fire hazard hot? Of course, that’s not known as yet, and I’m sure testing is being done in that department to find out if the firmware upgrades will turn RAIDDrives into an inferno, but still, for extra fast transfer speeds, well, this is definitely where you want to start looking, but at $300.58 on Amazon for a 64 gig drive, you’d better want fast transfer speeds a lot more than storage space.

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