14 DAY TRIAL // No doubt, consumers have already heard more than enough about the revolutionary, ten-times-faster transfer speeds of USB 3.0 and the high performance of SATA 6Gbps. Unfortunately, neither of these two technologies has managed to truly grab the mainstream market by the reigns, mostly because of the low number of motherboards with built-in support for them. To make up for this, however, some companies have already launched a number of PCI Express cards. Two of the latest entries on this market are a couple of cards developed by Elitegroup Computer Systems (ECS), known as the ECS U3N2 and S6M2 expansion cards.
The ECS S6M2 SATA 6Gbps expansion card is powered by the Marvell SATA 6Gbps controller and, paired with high-performance SATA 6Gbps-compatible storage solutions, it will significantly boost the system performance. Users' systems will also be made available an eSATA 6Gbps port in order to reduce the time it takes to access large files.
The ECS U3N2 USB 3.0 expansion card works based on the NEC USB 3.0 controller chip and enables the now-infamous speed of up to 5Gbps. Ten times faster than USB 2.0, SuperSpeed external devices are easily accessed thanks to a current output of at least 900mA for each port. Of course, the ECS U3N2 is backwards compatible with USB 2.0, providing full support for both older and new products based on the universal serial bus.
The ECS U3N2 and S6M2 PCI-E x1 expansion cards are different from onboard chips in the way that they are more flexible when it comes to occupying the PCI Express bandwidth. Both products also provide support for the PCI Express x4, x8 and x16 interfaces.
Unfortunately, the pricing and availability have not been mentionedm but the press release did say that the devices had “high class quality, best flexibility and competitive pricing.” They will be sold both stand-alone and bundled with high-end motherboards.
