14 DAY TRIAL // Coming to expand its already extensive collection of storage products, I-O Data has announced the TB-3NT Series of flash drive units featuring USB 3.0.
I-O Data is no stranger to the storage industry, not a new arrival, so it always has to look for ways to differentiate its new items from the old.
Then again, just the fact that they are new is usually enough to reel in more customers, since people are naturally drawn to more recent and, supposedly, better items.
As it happened, the TB-3NT series of flash drives really is better than many that came before it, by virtue of its connectivity technology.
What I-O Data did was go for USB 3.0, the latest iteration of the Universal Serial Bus standard, otherwise called SuperSpeed.
For those who want a reminder, the interface has a theoretical maximum rate of 5 Gbps (4.8 Gbps), ten times what USB 2.0 can do.
To seal the deal, I-O Data threw in three capacity options and the same number of available case colors (black, white and pink).
Speaking of the product features, the TB-3NT drives measure 18.0 x 69.4 x 7.6 mm (0.7 x 2.73 x 0.29 inches) and weigh 9 grams each.
Just how fast the read and write speeds are was not specifically mentioned, but it will still be a way above the 480 Mbps of the USB 2.0 operation mode.
That said, there are, or there will be, 8 GB, 16 GB and 32 GB units on sale, all of them in the aforementioned three color versions.
Shipments will begin around the middle of next month (November, 2011), until which prospective buyers can go here to check them out.
The prices are supposed to be of $24, $42 and $91, which is the same as roughly 17 Euro, 20 Euro and 65.86 Euro, respectively.