MSI to launch USB 3.0 and SATA 6G add-on cards

Much like ECS, ASUS and other MSI will also be launching a series of SATA6G and USB 3.0 add-on cards.

 The Star-USB3 (USB 3.0) expansion card will be powered by NEC USB 3.0 controller chip and delivers a new standard SuperSpeed USB 3.0 performance up to 5Gbps data-transfer rate which is 10 times faster than USB 2.0 and at least 900mA current output for each port to easily access real fast external devices.

 Next to that MSI will launch a USB 3.0 and SATA 6G expansion card which provides a great flexibility with its backward compatibility to USB 2.0 and earlier devices and thus supports high-speed SATA3 devices.

The new 3.0 (SATA 6 Gbit/s) standard can support a maximum of roughly 715MB/s without the encoding overhead. While even the fastest conventional hard disk drives can barely saturate the original SATA 1.5 Gbit/s bandwidth, Solid State Disk drives have already saturated the SATA 3 Gbit/s limit at 250 MB/s net read speed.

Ten channels of fast flash can reach well over 500 MB/s with new drives, so a move from SATA 3 Gbit/s to SATA 6 Gbit/s would benefit the flash read speeds. As for the standard hard disks, the reads from their built-in DRAM cache will end up faster across the new interface.