Today the USB Implementers Forum held its Taipei SuperSpeed USB Developers Conference 2010 and we were in attendance at the event to check out all of the latest cutting-edge developments to come to the new USB 3.0 connectivity standard. One of the exhibitors was ASMedia who is a Taiwanese IC maker. These folks were showing off one of the more exciting demonstrations in the exhibitor area. They had an ASUS powered system hooked up with a Crucial RealSSD C300 SATA 6Gbps SSD connected via USB 3.0. The SSD was able to be connected to the system via USB thanks to the use of an ASMedia USB 3.0 controller bridge device that translates SATA 3.0 to USB 3.0 data signals with the ASM1051 chip.

During our testing of various USB 3.0 devices so far, we’ve seen roughly 3 – 4 times performance improvements over USB 2.0. The results we’ve seen have not been as impressive as first expected by all the 10x performance gains by everyone who makes any sort of USB 3.0 product. The ASMedia ASM1051 controller chip achieved just over a 10x performance improvement with the Crucial SSD compared to the same setup with USB 2.0. This is the first time we’ve seen a product able to meet the claims of a 10x boost for USB 3.0 and we think it is exciting to see and we think it is also a good sign of things to come in the future.



Link: TweakTown