Freecom’s World first USB 3.0 external HDD

Once upon you would have had to knock up a few extra shelves to house your growing collection of movies, music and  important documents; but thankfully with the increasing digitisation of our day to day lives, you can now fit an entire library’s worth of information onto the smallest hard drives and storage devices. The problem is however that with ever-increasing file sizes the standard USB 2.0 connection is seeming a little slow, and can even make a spot of DIY carpentry look like a speedy alternative when faced with transferring something like a particularly hefty HD movie.

Thankfully though there’s an upgrade on the horizon with USB 3.0 offering a predicted tenfold increase over the file transfer speeds of our current connections. We’ve previously reported on the first PCI-E card to offer the upgrade to 3.0 and now comes the world’s first external hard drive to offer this super-charged technology.  The Hard Drive XS 3.0 comes from Freecom, an award-winning manufacturer of external hard drives and portable storage devices. Using USB 3.0 Freecom claim that their new drive offers transfer speeds of approximately 130 MB/s, significantly faster than existing solutions, enabling users to back up and upload information in a matter of seconds. Measuring only 3.5 inches it’s also one of the smallest desktop drives on the market and weighing in at just 860 grams it’s ideal for those that want to carry their data on the move. But don’t let it’s size fool you. With storage capacities of up to 2TB, the Hard Drive XS 3.0 can hold up to to 400,000 MP3’s, more than 1.3 million digital photos, 400 full DVDs or 2,000 movies; and with the ability to transfer a 5GB movie in just 38 seconds you can backup your data in no time at all.

It even looks good and priced at just £99.99 for the 1TB model it’s good value too. Just a shame then that we’ll have to wait until mid-November for its European release.

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Correction – We’ve just heard from the company that the XS 3.0 is actually available immediately in EMEA.