14 DAY TRIAL // PQI has been dealing in flash drives for quite a while already, so it wasn't that big of a surprise, back at Computex 2010, in June, to learn it was embracing the newest and best yet USB standard.
As end-users know, Computex, Taipei, is an expo that takes place every year and has hardware makers from around the world showing off their various inventions.
This year, PQI was, of course, present, and its flash drive lineup included a certain so-called Cool Drive U339V.
This highly mobile storage unit based on NAND Flash memory chips measures 68 x 9 x 18.5 mm and has a weight of 13 grams.
The brushed aluminum casing, while stylish and bearing a measure of endurance, cannot be said to be one of the main highlights of this release.
What is truly noteworthy is that the drive features support for the SuperSpeed USB 3.0 interface standard.
For those that, for some reason or another, do not know yet, the USB 3.0 connection is ten times faster than USB 2.0, with a transfer speed of up to 5 Gbps.
In the case of the Cool Drive U339V, this allows for read and write speeds of 54 MB/s and 10 MB/s, respectively, for the 8 GB model.
There is also a 16 GB model, which reads data at 68 MB/s and writes it at 30 MB/s.
What's more, the series also includes a 32 GB and a 64 GB drive, both of them having the same speed ratings, of 68 MB/s when reading and 30 MB/s when writing.
Other specifications include temperature ranges of 0°C to 65°C during operation and -20°C to 75°C during storage, plus backwards compatibility with USB 2.0 and USB 1.1.
Each flash drive should start to show up in online stores soon, but there has been no mention of pricing.