If the USB 3.0 should only become available on the mass market during 2010, all manufacturers of computers and peripherals are already working on it. The main advantage of USB 3.0 is the transfer speed, and many are thinking of using it for external HD.
Bridge SATA towards USB 3.0 is one of the first device to develop. LucidPort and Fujitsu are already working on it and should release it as soon as the USB 3.0 interface hits the mass market, to offer external HD enclosures delivering over 200 MB/s, much more than the current USB 2.0 and could even be more than Firewire 800. Of course, only RAID volumes and SSDs will be able to offer such transfer speed, so it will revive the competition between high speed external HD and SSDs. In one year, the latest might be so much cheaper that we could even think of having SSDs in external storage unit, the last limiting factor being capacity.
