With the advent of USB, a number of peripherals were devised to take advantage of this simple and fast interface. USB 1.1 was the first version and lasted a while and was relatively slow at 1.5 Mb/s data transfer rate. This was followed by USB 2.00 which offers data transfer speeds at 480 Mb/s. This is fast enough for most applications but the computer world is power and speed fanatic and USB 3.00 made its presence felt on the scene with a transfer speed 10 times that of USB 2.00, typically 5Gb/s, while being backward compatible. USB 3.00 ports are now commonplace in computers and other devices. SSD’s typically take advantage of USB 3.0 to give lightning fast data transfer facilities in super fast PCs of today.

Kingston Digital is one of the players in solid state flash memory and storage devices and introduced its USB 3.0 flash drive, the Data Traveler Ultimate 3.0 followed by the HyperX MAX 3.0 USB flash drive some time back. Kingston has active plans for future devices utilizing and taking advantage of USB 3.0. It plans to introduce flash drives for all people at affordable prices in addition to enhancing its high end range.

Kingston has a family of high performance Flash products under the HyperXperience line which currently includes the Data Traveler HyperX 3.0 with soon to be released SSD’s, USB’s and cards based on HyperX enthusiast memory modules. These may be the high end side of the range but Kingston has plans for entry level single chip controller USB 3.0 flash drives by the middle or end of 2011 in the Data Traveler DTU30 brand, in the popular 16, 32 and 64 GB capacities.