Sonnet Technologies introduces USB 3.0 adapter cards

Sonnet Technologies has introduced its first USB 3.0 host controller cards — Allegro USB 3.0 PCIe and USB 3.0 ExpressCard/34 — for Windows desktop and notebook computers, respectively.

The latest additions to the company’s selection of PCI Express and ExpressCard/34 adapters deliver faster performance when used with drives equipped with the USB 3.0 interface, but support USB 2.0 and 1.1 devices for expanded backward compatibility.

SuperSpeed USB (USB 3.0) offers an up to 10X increase in data transfer speed over Hi-Speed USB 2.0, the decade-old interface found in practically every computer sold today. While handy, USB 2.0 is not well suited for supporting external storage devices, limiting their data transfer speeds to approximately 30MB/s, even when they are capable of speeds of 125MB/s and faster. Sonnet’s Allegro USB 3.0 PCIe and USB 3.0 ExpressCard/34 adapters open this bottleneck to better support the speed potential of modern hard disk drives and solid state drives (SSDs).