LucidPort Technology has started shipping the USB300, a single chip USB 3.0 to SATA-II bridge designed for external storage devices. The USB300 links a SATA disk, hard disk (HDD) or solid state disk (SSD), to a USB host at Full Speed, Hi-Speed, or SuperSpeed. It works with both existing mass storage drivers (BOT) and the new USB Attached SCSI (UAS) driver. It also features AES 128/256 encryption, numerous general purpose IOs with pulse width modulation, and SATA Native Command Queuing (NCQ) support.

The USB300 is the world's first commercially available USB 3.0 device. It substantiates the promise of SuperSpeed USB to significantly increase the throughput of USB devices. Using the standard Windows Mass Storage driver, the USB300 consistently transfers data at 210 Mbytes/sec to the SATA disk. UAS drivers increase this performance.

SuperSpeed USB delivers ten times the performance of Hi-Speed USB 2.0 while offering backward compatibility with the billions of USB-enabled PCs and peripheral devices in use today. "The market expects USB 3.0 to be fast," said Reid Augustin, VP, Product Development at LucidPort. "The USB300 meets that challenge by making the full SATA-II bandwidth accessible from USB."