Freecom from Germany couldn't wait to release its USB Hard Drive XS 3.0 which is, as you probably guessed, the worlds first SuperSpeed USB storage to be sold to the general public. Granted, there aren't any motherboards nor OS drivers available to support this, but Freecom has USB 3.0 cards for both laptop and desktop PCs, and these come with proprietary drivers.

Aimed mostly at the end user, this new USB external drive offers speeds of up to 130MBytes a second! (or 1040Mb/s); in comparison, the fastest USB 2.0 drive maxes out at 40MBytes/s (or 320Mb/s). Better silicons both for SATA bridge and host will emerge to further improve throughput so it's likely performance of future USB 3.0 drives will double.

The Hard Drive XS 3.0 also allows for top grade encryption with AES 256-bit strength. Freecom expects to ship the 3.5" SuperSpeed USB 3.0 drive in mid-November starting at 1 Terabyte for $189.99; the USB 3.0 PCIe card and ExpressCard will hit retail the same time for $53 and $56 respectively.

It is only a matter of time before Version 3.0 Promotional USB drives become available to the general public! With more and more companies needing a quicker data transport solution these promotional USB drives will soon be shipping with usb 3.0 chips.