Until Jobs gives the nod to USB 3.0, we probably won’t see any Mac with the 5Gbps interface anytime soon. But this doesn’t stop innovations by third party manufacturers like CalDigit. This AV specialist company has engineered a speedy USB 3.0 drive – obviously to be way ahead of its time, at least in the Mac peripheral market. Having said that, the CalDigit AV USB 3.0 Drive (up to 2TB) is made for video editing in mind.
The latest benchmark numbers for the CalDigit AV reveal that the drive doesn’t disappoint with a top sustained write speed of 149MB/s. Also impressive is the unit’s FireWire 800 performance, hitting 85MB/s. The only USB 3.0 drive that compares favorably is the
Seagate GoFlex Desk 3TB, which we recorded close to 160MB/s write speed. Keep in mind the CalDigit is designed exclusively for Mac Pro and MacBook Pro 17″ as you need to upgrade to USB 3.0 with appropriate adapters. Snow Leopard however doesn’t yet support USB 3.0 so CalDigit took the liberty to develop the industry’s first driver especially for its SuperSpeed ExpressCard and PCI Express.
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This is certainly a sign USB 3.0 train is finally picking up steam. Sony Japan has just announced their prestige line of notebooks will come with USB 3.0 support. These desktop-replacement full HD VAIO laptops come with possibly almost everything you can hope for with the exception of 3D and SSD. The more expensive model ($2,970) will have Core i7-740QM, GeForce GT 425M 1GB graphics card while the lower end laptop ($2,140) will only carry a Core i5-460M and GeForce 310M 512MB. Both share 4GB RAM, the same Blu-ray reader, 500GB 2.5″ drive and a dual HDTV tuner as well as a 16.4″ full HD LCD.
In the connectivity department,
both laptops will feature not one but two USB 3.0 ports – likely powered by none other than
Renesas / NEC. There’s also one eSATA-hijacked USB 2.0 port; HDMI interface; SDXC card slot; a Memory Stick Duo slot; and Bluetooth 3.0+HS. Since most laptop components including trackpad, keyboard and webcam nowadays piggyback on USB bus, it would be interesting to see if the integrated SDXC reader will also take advantage of the SuperSpeed interface. While there’s no international pricing for these VAIOs, it’s obviously the worldwide
USB 3.0 revolution has started even without Intel.
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