We dropped by to get a look at Symwave's SuperSpeed promised USB 3.0 setup, and got a real earful on the technology and its potential. Due to start shipping in devices near the end of the year, Symwave's chipset will hold up the device-end of the transaction, communicating with SATA for 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch drives. Since the host end of USB 3.0's plug is fully compatible with USB 2.0 (and 1.0, as it turns out), they expect folks to start buying future-proof USB 3.0 hard drives and wait for computer manufacturers to build it in -- or just grab a PCIe card if they're really enthusiastic. With around 10 times the headroom -- about 500MB a second -- of USB 2.0, the real bottleneck now is hard drive speeds. In the test we saw, the drive averaged around 78MB per second, and we can easily see SSD and RAID scenarios exploring this transfer speed. Their prototype setup to accomplish this was sprawling and a little bit ghetto, but by the time this is shipping in devices the chip will be shrunk down to about the size of a stamp. Action video is after the break.

We get the feeling that Symwave won't be the only outfit at CES 2009 showing off the flashiest revision of the USB protocol, but it will reportedly be the first to showcase USB 3.0 transfers to and from an external storage device. 'Course, we've already seen that SuperSpeed USB works (and works quickly), so we'll be most interested in seeing what external HDDs it relies on to make the magic happen. After all, the protocol can't gain traction without a small swarm of supportive devices on the market, right?

It's been nearly a year since we first saw the USB 3.0 connector make an appearance at CES, and after months of corporate infighting, spec-polishing, and technical navel-gazing, the future of consumer peripheral connectivity is here -- in the form of complete specifications and a demo. Yeah, so maybe SuperSpeed USB isn't making the most dramatic entrance ever, but hey, it doesn't have to with 4.8Gbps transfer speeds, improved power management, and backwards compatibility with USB 2.0 along for the ride. As expected, the first wave of devices won't hit until 2010, but Symwave's giving attendees of this week's SuperSpeed conference a taste of tomorrow with a demo of the Quasar USB 3.0 chipset, which is targeted at "sync-and-go" devices like phones and media players. Sounds lovely -- now if you'll excuse us, we have to go back to mourning the death of FireWire 400.

[Via Gearlog]

Read - SuperSpeed USB 3.0 spec released
Read - Symwave demos first USB 3.0 physical layer device

The 1394 Trade Association is already talking up FireWire S3200, but Symwave is taking baby steps, demonstrating a 1.6Gbps system known as S1600 (shocking) that's backwards-compatible with FireWire 800 and 400 this week at a conference in China. That's great and all -- transferring 1000 four megapixel images in five seconds sure sounds like a good time -- but speeds like that probably aren't going to cut it when FireWire 800 devices are already thin on the ground, everyone's looking forward to S3200, and the 4.8Gbps USB 3.0 spec is already making appearances on schedule for a launch in 2010. Not to mention that Wireless USB 1.1's target speed is 1.0Gbps -- you know we'll take a slight speed hit if we can ditch the cables.

[Via PC World; Warning: PDF read link]