Seagate Speeds Up Transfer Rates With USB 3.0 External HD

By Dena Cassella January 5, 2010

Seagate unveiled its BlackArmor PS110 USB 3.0 portable external hard drive performance kit for notebook computers at CES today. The company is the latest hard-drive manufacturer to bust out a USB 3.0 external HDD and since they know that most users probably won’t have a USB 3.0 port on their existing notebook they’ve thrown in a portable HD performance kit. This all-in-one USB 3.0 tool kit packages a 500GB 7200RPM 2.5–inch portable hard drive, power cable and PC express card, to deliver real-world speeds up to three times faster than its USB 2.0 predecessor.

Seagate claims its one of the fastest portable hard drives available in today’s market. Seagate says its new BlackArmor USB 3.0 portable drive achieves 3X performance over USB 2.0 in real world testing meaning it a 25GB HD movie can be transferred in just four minutes versus the 14 minutes it would take using a traditional USB 2.0 drive.

“To date, the USB interface is the most prevalent interface and will continue to dominate as the interface of choice through 2011,” said Liz Conner, lead research analyst of IDC’s Personal Storage Research. “This will be re-enforced with the introduction of USB 3.0, which provides significantly increased bandwidth to better handle the growing number of large multimedia files being stored to external hard drives.”

The new BlackArmor PS 110 USB 3.0 performance kit is backwards compatible with USB 2.0 and is currently available at Seagate.com for about $179.99.

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