Sunbeamtech Jumps on USB 3.0 Bandwagon

Even though the USB 3.0 market segment was quite underrepresented a few months ago, the steady inflow of storage units, docking stations and expansion cards (among others) designed for the new standard has brought the market to a point where the new technology is no longer completely scarce. Among the latest releases for this area are three products from Sunbeamtech, a Taiwanese company that has introduced an expansion card, an HDD/SSD dock and an external hard drive enclosure.

The HDD/SD dock measures 132 x 94 x 69 mm and has the already-famous transfer rate of up to 5Gbps. The device is known as the Sunbeamtech USB3.0 HDDPAL and will work with hard drives and solid state drives using either of the the 2.5-inch and the 3.5-inch form factors. The dock is compatible with Windows 2000 / 2003 / XP / Vista / Win 7 MAC OS 10.3 or higher operating systems and, of course, is backwards compatible with USB 2.0 and 1.1.

The second in the line of USB 3.0 products from the Taiwanese company is the USB3.0 Airbox. This device is an aluminum external hard drive enclosure that can support 3.5-inch SATA hard disks with maximum capacities of 2TB. The black enclosure weighs 435 grams, measures 203 (L) x 126 (W) x 44 (H) mm and even features an 80mm fan that spins at 1600 RPM. The fan is equipped with a blue LED light.

Finally, the third device launched by the company is a USB 3.0 expansion card. This product operates on the PCI Express x1 interface and provides two USB 3.0 ports that are also backwards compatible with the USB 2.0 and 1.1 devices. As all expansion cards, this device is meant to enable users to upgrade their systems without having to change their motherboard.

These products will be made available during the current month, but their prices have not been mentioned as of yet.