USB Driver speed rolling SSD disk

The previous mobile hard drive was so big that it was hard to carry, with fragile structure and slow speed. Solid state drive has become more affordable this year as the price of flash memory has fallen rapidly. Thus, the market for USB mobile hard drives based on solid state drives is booming. As shown above, it is very convenient to make a mobile hard drive, just buying a solid state drive with an M.2 interface and plugging it into a compact hard drive. The key chip in this hard drive is the USB bridge chip, which can convert USB and USB Type-C interfaces into standard solid state drive’s interfaces such as SATA and PCIe, as well as UFS, SD card and other embedded memory card interfaces. The previous U-disk speed was only tens of MB/s, while the current mobile solid state drive speed can reach hundreds of MB/s, or even more than 1 GB/s. The mobile hard drive can be as large as a nomal U disk, becoming a high-speed U disk.

The following figure shows the speed evolution of various storage interfaces. It can be seen that the latest USB 3.2 interface speed has exceeded the traditional hard drive interface SATA, reaching 20Gb/s. Given most of the current computers are still SATA hard drives with a maximum speed of 6Gb/s, it means that the new U disk is faster than most hard drives.

The following figure shows the measured performance of Thunderbolt interface high-speed U disk based on the JMicron USB bridge chip, the speed of reading and writing more than 1700MB / s!

The following figure introduces the performance data of JMicron high-speed U disk based on USB 3.1 Gen2 PCIe bridge chip with 512GB Samsung 970 PRO solid state drive, the speed exceeding 1GB/s.

There are many markets for high-speed U disks:

1. Expanding computer hard drive capacity. The speed of the USB mobile hard drive is faster than that of the SATA hard drive, so it’s more convenient to put the data in the high-speed U disk.

2. Upgrading the computer hard drive. For older computers without SSDs or PCIe SSDs, the operating system can be installed into a high-speed U disk to boot quickly.

3. Backing up mobile phone data. Now the pictures and videos quickly fill up the capacity of mobile phone, so it need to find a computer backup. Computer backup is not only troublesome, but also slow. However, surprisingly high-speed U disk can quickly and conveniently back up the phone data through the Type-C or Lightning interface. As shown below, just install an APP on your phone.

Many people think that there is a Wifi hard drive for data backup, but this solution is very expensive. As shown in the figure below, the cost of the wireless hard drive chip is more than 20 dollars, and the cost of the high-speed U disk bridge chip is less than 2 dollars, cheaper than expanding the SD card.

Behind the prosperity of the high-speed U-disk market is the contribution of Taiwan JMicron Technology Corporation, the leader of USB bridge chip. In the first half of 2018, JMicron Technology shipped over 3.5 million bridge chips per month, ranking first in the industry.