Buffalo ships first USB 3.0 hard drive

Buffalo Technology seems to have won the race as the first vendor to actually ship a USB 3.0 hard drive.

Buffalo's new USB 3.0 hard drive

(Credit: Buffalo Technology)

The company announced Tuesday that it is shipping its new SuperSpeed USB 3.0 external DriveStation HD-HXU3. Tapping into the speed of the new USB 3.0 spec, the drive can push data at least three times faster than a USB 2.0 drive.

Available in 1-terabyte, 1.5TB, and 2TB capacities, the drive is backward-compatible with existing USB 2.0 computers, said Buffalo. The company is also releasing a two-port USB 3.0 PCI card, so users can upgrade their desktop PCs to take advantage of the drive's higher speeds.

Since the USB 3.0 Promoter Group finalized the new USB 3.0 standard about a year ago, vendors have been pushing to get their new products out the door.

Buffalo had been dueling with Netherlands-based company Freecom to actually deliver the first USB 3.0 hard drive to consumers, not just announce it. Freecom had issued a press release promoting its own USB 3.0 drive in September. That drive was supposed to be available in Europe by mid-November, but I was unable to find any European vendors selling it online.

Responding to an earlier request for comment, a Freecom representative said that samples of the drive were sent to some PC manufacturers and key customers this month. But due to an order backlog, the drive would not generally be available to all customers until next year.

With its higher transfer rates, the new USB standard is ideal for moving around large images as well as huge audio and video streams. As such, USB 3.0 is seen as competition for other high-speed transfer technologies, such as eSATA and FireWire.

Though USB 3.0 offers a theoretical maximum burst rate of 625MB or 4.8 gigabits per second, neither the Buffalo nor Freecom drive will come close to that mark at this point. Freecom has rated its drive at 130 megabits per second while a Buffalo representative told me his company's drive would average around 120Mbps.

USB 3.0 has been promoted as offering speeds up to 10 times faster than USB 2.0. But manufacturers will need time to rev up their new drives to approach that threshold.

When will the new Buffalo drive actually hit the stores? The company rep said it's now shipping to online vendor Microcenter and should be available for purchase the week of December 7. Estimated prices are $199 for the 1TB, $249 for the 1.5TB, and $399 for the 2TB.

Updated at 10:25 a.m. PST to include a response from Freecom.

[metomjr]

Pretty nifty. But, how much is the desktop card? Couldn't find any mention of the drive or card on microcenter's website.

[bodywave]

List price for the card will be $60. However, contrary to this article, it is a PCI Express card (not regular PCI). Therefore, it will not work with older desktops that don't have PCI Express slots, nor desktops where all the PCI Express slots have been taken. Buffalo's card is low profile, supposedly for the sake of "small form factor" PCs but SFF boxes often only have 1 available PCI Express slot to start with, and people often choose to use it for a video card. I think the audience for Buffalo's card will be somewhat limited, and that's going to restrain demand for the drives because they're a little too pricey if you're only going to use them in USB 2.0 mode. I don't think we'll see USB 3.0 take off until a fair number of motherboards start shipping with USB 3.0 ports.

[Mergatroid Mania]

There are different sizes of PCIe slots. Somehow I doubt this card would be going into the video card slot.<br /><br />Most boards that have a PCI Express 16 slot will also have at least one smaller slot.

[psrdesigns]

thats cool, i think its still a littile to early, sounds like a marketing scheme because i dont know any computers that will be able to use USB 3.0 unless you buy their USB 3.0 PCI card.

[BigGuns149]

For individuals who actually want to fill that 1-2TB HDD in a reasonable period of time they be able to rationalize the added cost to get the added performance. That being said I wouldn't be surprised if some sleazy or ignorant salespeople will tell people that it is faster, but forget to mention that you need to plug it into a USB 3.0 port to get that advantage.

Since when is three times faster in 10 years exciting progress in technology? Remember double every 1.5 years...

[Lennron]

That's exactly what I was thinking. Three times faster doesn't sound very exciting to me. Wasn't USB 2.0 fourty times faster than USB 1.1?

[Get_Bent]

USB speeds:<br /><br />2.0 -- 480Mbps<br />3.0 -- 5,000Mbps<br /><br />These are the maximum signaling rates; actual throughput is lower. The question is, which speeds are they comparing? It sounds to me like 2.0 maximum versus 3.0 actual.

[Mergatroid Mania]

That's double the number of transistors (If you're talking about Moor's Law), and has nothing to do with speed.<br /><br />Considering USB 2.0 is already very fast, three times that speed is awesome.

[spoonie1972]

sad that although it gets faster and faster, it doesn't have some of the cool features (peer-peer-host-host) like FW.

[Mr. Dee]

Bought a 1 TB Iomega drive the other day (USB 2.0) and it does the job just fine. Probably won't get this until my next desktop purchase which is somewhere around 2012.

[Mergatroid Mania]

Yeah, I have a nice external USB2.0 drive as well. It does work nice and is very fast depending on what you're doing with it.<br /><br />I just tried Windows 7 backup and it took about a half hour for about 35G of data. That's not great, however I must admit I can use other programs to take an image of my hard drive, and they are a lot faster at it. So I don't think USB2 is the bottleneck in my case, but rather MS's backup program. Still, copying 13G from my computer to the external drive takes about 11 minutes. Three times faster would be pretty nice.

[BigGuns149]

It gets the job done, but if you actually plan on restoring all of that data in a reasonable period of time I think that you would very *much* appreciate even a 50% improvement in speed nevermind a possibly far better improvement than that.<br /><br />Merely because USB 2.0 works doesn't mean that USB 3.0 won't get the job done much faster.

[Michichael]

Yes, let's release a product and tout it's new, higher speeds to a customer base that can't actually utilize them for another year or so until it becomes standard. The normal customer is too stupid to understand USB2 vs USB3

[technewsjunkie]

OS Support??

[ProfFrink]

The included software supports both Windows and Mac but I'd wager since it is USB, any system would still recognize it as a hard drive.

[norcalrivercat]

It'll take awhile before the rest of the industry runs on 3.0 standard, not a big deal yet.

[ProfFrink]

Can anyone find out what rpm's these hard drives run at? If they're using 5400 rpm hard drives, would you even notice the speed increase of the data transfer? Or would they use something like the 15000 rpm hard drives to really show off the speeds?

[watersports2001]

I couldn't find the drive but I did find the pci express card for $50 U.S.D and they are not in stock.<br /><br />http://www.windowsmobilenow.com/us/p_wm_acc1.aspx?i=192066&#38;t=description<br /><br />I'm still looking to see when more computers have the plugs on their systems. It would be more fun to find a router with usb 3 so I don't have to invest in all current pc's.

[wking33]

The through put is still limited to the access of the HDD. I think the 3.0 standard may have the ability to transfer data at the 4.8 Gbps (max) speed, but look at the SATA transfer rate vs. the real usable speeds. It seems as though USB 3.0 is trying to get in the competition for eSATA.