Lexar brand announced this week that they’d be releasing a number of USB jump drives with resistance to impact, pressure, weather, and water. These jump drives will be able to roll with USB 3.1 ports, and will be backwards compatible with USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 ports as well. These USB sticks are able to withstand heavy-duty action and have a loop to attach to a variety of keychains, carabiners, or other oddities.
Seagate has announced a new external storage drive that is portable has has lots and lots of storage space. The drive is called the Backup Plus Portable 5TB drive and it is the largest capacity mobile drive on the market. Seagate says that the high-capacity portable drive is perfect for users who like to shoot 4k video and high-resolution images.
Kingston Digital has unveiled a pair of new flash drives that aim at the user who needs a drive that has lots of security to protect the data on it. The new flash drives are the IronKey D300 and D300 Managed encrypted USB flash drives. Both of these drives have advanced levels of encryption including FIPS 140-2 Level 3 certified and featuring 256-bit AES hardware encryption in XTS mode.
Lexar has introduced its new Professional XQD 2.0 USB 3.0 Reader, and it’ll start shipping it later this month. The reader is aimed at videographers and photographers with professional-level requirements, enabling them to transfer 4K-resolution and RAW images at high speeds using SuperSpeed USB 3.0 technology. The reader, as its name suggests, works with XQD 2.0 cards.
StarTech has unveiled a new line of USB docking stations that make it easy for people to add an additional screen to their computers using nothing but a USB port. The docking stations need a USB 3.0 port and work with any Windows 7 or higher PC and Mac OS 10.8 and higher. There are three different models with different display connectivity options to choose from.
Samsung has announced the launch of a new USB flash drive product lineup. There are a total of three new flash drive designs, each one promised to be ergonomic and, as you can see in the image above, fairly attractive. All three flash drives are USB 3.0 and sport the maker’s NAND flash, and are all compatible with USB 2.0. This is part of Samsung’s effort to increase the branded storage options it offers for consumers, and joins its other existing flash drives, as well as SSDs and more.
Sometimes the few minutes it can take a flash driver to transfer large files from the PC to the drive so you can take them with you on the road seems like an eternity. USB 3.0 flash drives increased the speed at which these file transfers can be performed but if you are looking for even more speed the new Super Talent Dram Disk claims some impressive performance.
ASUS has just announced its first all-in-one desktop PC to be included in their Zen line of premium products: the 23.8-inch Zen AiO (Z240IC), boasting both USB 3.1 connectivity and Intel's RealSense 3D camera technology. There is also a 21.5-inch model Zen AiO (Z220IC), which leaves out the RealSense. Both models feature a design that's right out of Apple's iMac design book, with an aluminum unibody that tapers down to only 6mm thick on the edges, and a display behind edge-to-edge glass.
Other World Computing (OWC) launched its latest collection of thumb-sized solid state drives (SSD) today at an industry trade show in Las Vegas. OWC's Envoy Pro mini SSD utilizes a USB 3.0 port and can run on Mac, PC or Linux. The biggest point that sets SSD drives apart from traditional USB drives is the transfer speed. This OWC model can sustain speeds of up to 433 Mb/s and has a max speed of 500 Mb/s.
USB Type C is all the rage lately. The new Chromebook has it, and the MacBook relies on it entirely. You and I, though — we’re not there yet. While we’re still in USB land, hubs like the iLynx 3.0 from Moshi will remain as relevant as ever, but is it worth buying? We talk about future tech a lot, and that’s what (reversible) USB Type C is, but for right now (and really for the foreseeable future), USB is where it’s at.
VisionTek has announced the launch of a pair of new pocket size USB 3.0 SSDs that are designed to work with any major computer OS out there. These new drives will support Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows computers. VisionTek says that the performance of these USB 3.0 SSDs rivals the performance of an internal SSD and they can be used as a bootable Windows drive for Macs providing office-on-the-go use.
USB Type-C won't just address the perennial frustration of trying to plug in your charger upside-down, but also double as a DisplayPort connection in a move that could well challenge Intel's Thunderbolt. DisplayPort Alternate Mode, announced by VESA today, will mean a single USB Type-C cable will be able to drive a 4K or higher resolution display, along with audio, USB 3.1 data, and even up to 100W of power.
