Category Archives: USB Drive

OWC Envoy Pro EX – Portable, Bus-Powered USB 3.0 Storage Solution with OWC Aura Pro SSD

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Snip20130501_1 Snip20130501_2

Ultra-portable, SuperSpeed bus-powered external SSD storage solution. With blistering fast transfer rates of up to 500MB/s, the Envoy Pro EX can handle any demanding storage and/or backup need in the office or on the road. And because it’s USB 3.0 bus-powered*, the Envoy Pro EX doesn’t require an AC power adapter, making it the ideal Plug and Play external storage solution.

More info click here.

Thanks to OWC (Other World Computing) aka macsales.com

USB 3 – The Facts

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usb3

USB 3.0 is the second major revision of the Universal Serial Bus (USB) standard for computer connectivity. The standard from 2008 implements a 5 Gbit/s transfer rate. In the late 1990s, the first major revision was made to the USB 1.1 specification. The revision was called USB 2.0 which added a new transfer speed called Hi-Speed (HS – 480 Mbit/s) to the earlier speeds (Low Speed (LS) – 1.5 Mbit/s and Full Speed (FS) – 12 Mbit/s).

The enhancements to Super Speed USB are not just for higher data rates, but for improving the interaction between device and host computer. While the core architectural elements are inherited from before, several changes were made to support the dual bus arrangement, and several more are notable for how users can experience the improvement that USB 3.0 makes over USB 2.0.

Major USB 3.0 improvements

  • Higher transfer rates (up to 4.8Gbps)
  • Increased maximum bus power
  • New power management features
  • Full-duplex data transfers
  • Support for new transfer types
  • Backward USB 2.0 compatibility
  • New connectors and cables

The good news is that USB 3.0 has been carefully planned from the start to peacefully co-exist with USB 2.0. First of all, while USB 3.0 specifies new physical connections and thus new cables to take advantage of the higher speed capability of the new protocol, the connector itself remains the same rectangular shape with the four USB 2.0 contacts in the exact same location as before. Five new connections to carry receive and transmitted data independently are present on USB 3.0 cables and only come into contact when mated with a proper Super Speed USB connection.

USB 3.0 achieves the much higher performance by way of a number of technical changes. Perhaps the most obvious change is an additional physical bus that is added in parallel with the existing USB 2.0 bus. This means that where USB 2.0 previously had 4 wires (power, ground, and a pair for differential data), USB 3.0 adds 4 more for two pairs of differential signals (receive and transmit) for a combined total of 8 connections in the connectors and cabling. These extra two pairs were necessary to support the Super Speed USB target bandwidth requirements, because the two wire differential signals of USB 2.0 were not enough.

The Cable circuit for USB3 shielded wire as follows

usb3a

Latest OS from Apple and Microsoft starts supporting USB3 with connector. Apple OSX Mountain Lion and Windows 8 comes with USB3 driver support.

Cool!!!

SSD (Solid State Drive) vs Flash drive (USB drive)

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Most of the friends and collegues starts asking me the question about the difference between SSD and Flash Drive. I thought of writing this blog..so here it is

‘Flash Drives’ are a generic term which used for anything from USB memory sticks to SSDs. An USB flash drive uses lower quality low performance NAND flash with just 1 or 2 channels. Its durable, cheap but slow. An SSD on the other hand uses high performance NAND with mutliple channels. ( 12 or 8 is not uncommon), and there is a  memory controller on a SSD which is much better and both can store data even if its not powered.
Flash drives (USB) are slow storage devices where as SSDs are high performance drives. They’re much faster than normal HDDs.

A USB flash drive uses USB, which is generally a slower interface than the Serial ATA interface. A USB flash drive is generally thought of as a removable device by the OS and is managed as such. A SSD is treated similarly to a hard drive, and is often recognized by your OS as a type of fixed disk.

USB flash drives and solid-state drives are both based on flash memory. Most of the flash memory use  NAND memory, which are available as single-level cells (SLC) and multi-level cells (MLC). Single-level cells store a single bit in a single memory cell, whereas multi-level cells store more than a single bit in a single memory cell. The MLC accomplishes this by allowing each memory cell to store multiple electrical states, therefore, allow one MLC cell to store more information than one SLC cell. For example, a MLC that uses 4-levels can store 2 bits of information.  MLC are cheaper, as they can store more information per memory cell than SLC. Cheap, large SSDs and USB flash memory use MLC disks, although not necessarily. MLCs sounds great in terms of storage density, but it does have a catch. MLCs are  slower than SLC. Therefore, the large capacity USB flash drives and SSDs tend to be slower. Solid-State Drives (SSDs) have no moving parts, high reliability and longer life-span than traditional hard drives

Wikipedia definition about SSD and Flash Drive

One of the example of SSD is Intel X25-E Extreme SATA Solid State Drive

Courtsey : Intel… to know more about this, Click here

To know some other product Iomega® External SSD Flash Drive, SuperSpeed USB 3.0, Click here