Sep 28, 2010 13:33 GMT  ·  By

Apparently thinking it was about time it joined in on the fun, Toshiba came forth and revealed that it has developed the Canvio 3.0, a line of external hard disk drives that are designed with the SuperSpeed USB 3.0 connection.

As end-users probably know by now, the SuperSpeed iteration of the Universal Serial Bus interface, USB 3.0 as it were, is the latest incarnation of this standard.

Compared to USB 2.0, USB 3.0 operates about ten times faster, reaching roughly 5 Gbps, this being the reason why it has already become so popular even in absence of native chipset support.

After a time during which it stuck to the USB 2.0 interface, Toshiba has now unveiled the Canvio 3.0 collection of USB 3.0 external hard disk drives.

These newcomers come in three capacities, namely 500 GB, 750 GB and 1 TB, though they are not so different from their USB 2.0 counterparts in any other noticeable way.

Still, Toshiba threw in the pre-loaded NTI BackupNow EZ software, which can perform various backup options on a PC.

The other asset of the drives is their 256-bit encryption, which provides data security, while shock sensors give them physical endurance as well.

“Power digital consumers, and even typical PC users, are storing high definition video content, high resolution digital images, and multi-gigabyte music collections,” said Manuel Camarena, product manager for consumer storage at Toshiba Storage Device Division.

“When you consider that a single HD video can easily be three times the size of the same video in standard definition, it’s easy to see why file transfer speeds are just as important as storage capacity,” he added.

“With the integration of the USB 3.0 interface, Canvio 3.0 drives significantly improve file transfer performance for large media files and dramatically minimize the wait time for backup and recovery processes,” Camarena went on to saying.

The 500 GB, 750 GB and 1 TB versions of the Toshiba Canvio 3.0 sell for $119.99, $129.99 and $179.99, respectively.