LaCie and Philippe Starck have hooked up yet again for an iconic and smooth looking combo of aluminum, what could pass for mercury (not the planet) and an ultra-fast USB 3.0 connection.

The LaCie Starck Mobile USB 3.0 is backward compatible with USB 2.0 – simply connect it into any PC or Mac for a seamless plug-and-play experience.

Encased in 2mm of sturdy aluminum, the LaCie Starck Mobile USB 3.0 is one the most resistant choices for consumer hard drives on the market. The aluminum offers resilience from blunders, improved heat dissipation, and is fully recyclable.

The LaCie Starck Mobile Drive USB 3.0 at 320gb priced at $69.99 and the 500gb at $109.99.

[ Links: Philippe Starck Mobile Drive USB 3.0 ]

With USB 3.0 coming out very soon, it is expected all that had preceded it (USB 1.0, 1.1 and 2.0 for instance) will be destroyed by how fast it can access other USB 3.0 enabled devices. Tweaktown [ site here ] puts an early chipset through its paces against Firewire 400, Firewire 800, eSATA, SATA and USB 2.0 of course with varying results.

In our first test using HD Tune Pro, we can see that USB 3.0 is plenty faster than USB 2.0 when using the Intel SSD. It’s not 10 times faster as the marketing data tells us, but it is six times faster and a good sign for a technology still in its early stages of deployment in the consumer space.

Tweaktown shows a few graphs worth of information that show how you might want to hold off and buy a SATA 2.0 and USB 3.0 based motherboard for your next PC build. Definitely worthy of a quick read [ read more ], and they found that SATA 2.0 is keeping pace and sometimes beat USB 3.0 – barely.

[ Tweaktown ]