Nanopoint announce USB 3.0 PCI-E card

Got lots of high definition video stored on your computer? Current USB speeds aren’t ideal for transferring large files, but they’re getting a serious upgrade. USB 3.0 offers theoretical transfer speeds of 4.8Gbps – a ten-fold increase over USB 2.0’s 480Mbps. It’s backwards compatible with current USB products, and won’t cost a huge amount more. Sound good? Well, you know there must be a catch, then.

Intel is the bigwig when it comes to implementing new input/output tech, as when they include it on their chipsets it will be supported by the majority of computers. Unfortunately, Intel is really dragging its feet over USB 3.0. The chipmaker doesn’t plan to offer full support until 2011, leaving other manufacturers to fill the void.

Step up UK distributor Nanopoint. The company is offering USB 3.0-ready ICY BOX external hard drive caddies (meaning you bring your own actual hard disk and pop it in the case), but even more helpfully you can now pick up a USB 3.0 PCI-E card. One of these little cards will allow just about everyone with a desktop PC to add some USB 3.0 ports to the back of their machine. Obviously, opening your PC case and inserting new hardware require a little bit of tech savvy-ness, but it’s a simple install.

Once you’ve got your USB 3.0 external hard drive and ports then you can combine the two for ludicrous speed. USB 3.0 does have a few drawbacks at this stage, however. It doesn’t currently have any official driver support from Windows, though Microsoft is planning to add that at in a service pack. That support should come to Windows 7 and likely Vista, though XP is an unknown. The current Linux kernel has USB 3.0 support raring to go, but there’s no information forthcoming about Macs.

That said, however, support is built into the ICY BOX hard drive caddies for Windows 7, Vista and XP. With the hard drive enclosures and PCI-E cards both coming in at around £40, if you’re looking for seriously fast file transfers then USB finally has you covered.