Solid-land drives take been around for a few years, only they have only begun to gain some real momentum over the past twelvemonth or then. Perhaps at a much slower pace than predicted, prices have come down significantly from offset-generation products, while capacity and performance has improved dramatically as well. There's still a lot to be made earlier SSDs can go mainstream, though not all the burden can be placed on them, equally supporting interfaces too required an upgrade.

This yr marked the beginning of a transition from SATA 3Gb/s to SATA 6Gb/due south, with AMD already implementing this engineering into their latest chipsets, and from USB ii.0 to USB three.0. Both take the potential to help drive need for SSD technology, simply we feel the latter in detail is much more than overdue, coming at a fourth dimension when the crumbling USB two.0 standard has become tremendously inefficient and is failing to meet today'south demands for portable storage.

Although eSATA has tried to answer the call for a faster external interface, it lacks the support, compatibility and flexibility offered by USB. Not many motherboards support the interface, and among those with eSATA connectivity, few provide powered ports, meaning that portable 2.5-inch devices crave an external power source to part.

For years we've been stuck in the slow lane, transferring information at around 20MB/s with USB 2.0. Despite the fact that way back in 2007 we were teased with the idea of USB 3.0 at the Intel Programmer Forum, the technology is only coming into fruition now. Information technology'south very easy to purchase a motherboard supporting the then-chosen SuperSpeed standard today, with enough available at under $100, but with no chipset integrating the engineering information technology seems mainstream adoption will have to await.

To add USB iii.0 back up to their products motherboard manufacturers are using a third party controller from NEC, which became bachelor tardily in 2009. The draw back here is that the controller is often starved of bandwidth on about boards that lack the bachelor PCI Express lanes to arrange for it correctly. The other glaring omission is the fact that the controller supports just two ports, and neither will exist easily attainable at the forepart of your case.

Withal, with the right motherboard it's nevertheless possible to take advantage of newly released USB iii.0 drives -- a handful of which are based on speedy SSD technology. Of course when talking about any production and using the words SSD and USB 3.0 in the aforementioned sentence, it'southward off-white to assume that it is going to exist anything but affordable.

That's the case with the new OCZ Enyo, which costs $220 for merely 64GB of storage, while the bigger 128GB and 256GB devices cost $410 and $820 each. If mobility and speed is what you are looking for, nevertheless, the Enyo might be worth every penny with its claimed transfer rates of up to 260MB/south for reads and 200MB/s for writing data. We know OCZ has made it their business to be at the forefront of SSD technology, so allow's detect out if they tin live up to their ambitions.