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Lucidport brings another step closer to the first SuperSpeed USB gear with the USB 3.0 to SATA-II bridge. The world’s first commercially USB 3.0 device links to native SATA-I/II storage whether it be a hard drive, solid state drive or Blu-ray burner and converts it into an <a href=http://www.everythingusb.com//external drive. Also unique is the support for USB Attached SCSI (UAS) driver in addition to traditional USB Mass Storage (MSC) driver compatibility. UAS is an overhaul of the current storage standard that will leverage SuperSpeed USB rate while providing some performance improvements for legacy USB 2.0 MSC devices.

To put this into perspective, LucidPort recorded 147MB/s for MSC protocol when interfacing to a PCIe x1 USB 3.0 host, which can be found on motherboard like the Asus P6X58. Switching to UAS protocol increased the speed to 173MB/s. In another test, connected to a native USB 3.0 host silicon, the MSC protocol managed 244MB/s while UAS hit 336MB/s, almost maxing out the limit of SATA-II. Other features include AES 128- and 256-bit hardware encryption and SATA native command queuing (NCQ) support.
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If you’ve gotten trade-show complementary flash drives hanging around that you aren’t using, donate them. RecycleUSB.com is taking donated drives and has partnered with the Sugar-on-a-Stick project to give kids a way to have their own personal PC (minus the PC). Sugar is an open-source project for turning a USB stick into bootable self-contained operating system. The system is based around the Fedora LiveUSB distro of Linux and can be run on almost any x86 computer laying around that supports booting from USB. It doesn’t even need to have a functioning hard drive. It’s a great learning environment for children and entire classrooms can share a single machine without worrying about stepping all over each other.

If you’d like to try Sugar for yourself you can download a copy and be up in running in no time. The program and source code are both available on their site. The minimum flash drive size you need to run Strawberry (codename for their latest release) is 1GB. Sugar and RecycleUSB.com are welcome site after all OLPC’s internal strife. This may not be One Laptop Per Child but it makes donated hardware go a LOT farther in schools. If you are thinking about trying it for yourself you might want to look into one of the larger and faster flash drives for a better experience. This is an easy cause to help out with. Give ’til it Giga-Hertz. Here’s the address.
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