The ink was dry on the SuperSpeed USB 3.0 specification last year, but there hasn’t been much activity in terms of consumer offerings. It looks like the flurry is about to gain some legs. Active Media announced their external SSD with the new, faster USB interface will be shipping this quarter. The Aviator 312 drives use solid state flash memory in lieu of traditional magnetic storage and are small enough to easily carry around. At 3-inches long and 0.2-inches thin, they’re not much bigger than a thick credit card. Here’s the kicker though — with the new SuperSpeed USB 3.0 spec, these drives can read data at up to 240-Megabytes per second. Write speeds are 33% slower, but 160MBps isn’t too shabby.
Active Media says a full HD movie, pegged at 25GB of storage can be transferred in two minutes with their Aviator 312 and a computer that supports the new USB 3.0 standard. Of course, the drives are backwards compatible with USB 2.0 and 1.1 as well, but you’ll be limited in speeds. The Aviator 312 line will appear on Amazon in capacities of 16, 32 and 64GB with prices ranging from $89 to $209.

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