Symwave announces world’s first USB 3.0 RAID storage controller

LAGUNA NIGUEL, USA: Symwave, a leading silicon supplier of system solutions for SuperSpeed USB devices, announced the immediate availability of the SW6318, a single chip USB 3.0 to dual SATA storage controller.

The SW6318 device is the industry’s first and highest performance solution with transfer speeds up to 400 MB/sec. This performance is more than ten times faster than current RAID storage solutions based on USB 2.0 technology and fully utilizes the speed and system level improvements that next-generation USB 3.0 technology delivers.

According to Brian O’Rourke, Principal Analyst at In-Stat, "Symwave has been at the forefront of USB 3.0 storage solutions and their SW6318 device should help to keep them there. Combining two 2.5 or 3.5 inch hard drives with USB 3.0 enables a full spectrum of storage products with unique selling features that were not possible with USB 2.0.”

Symwave’s innovative architecture delivers unparalleled performance bridging data from a USB 3.0 host to two SATA-II hard disk drives (HDDs) or solid state drives (SSDs). The highly integrated SW6318 System-on-Chip (SoC) is fully compliant with USB 3.0 and SATA-II specifications, and includes a hardware RAID engine with support for drive performance doubling (RAID 0) and data integrity mirroring (RAID 1), as well as AES hardware encryption engines capable of encrypting data at full line speed.

The SW6318 is the ideal solution to enable a new generation of ultra-high performance consumer and professional storage products.

“The SW6318 delivers the greater storage capacity, faster data transfers, and the ultimate data protection that consumers and professionals demand with their ever increasing accumulation of digital content of all types,” said John O’Neill, VP Marketing at Symwave. “The SW6318 enables our customers to combine two low-cost drives to create robust storage products with data integrity or transfer speeds faster than all other competing technologies combined.”

The SW6318 is fully compliant with the USB-IF certification and compliance program requirements for SuperSpeed USB devices. The SW6318 is compatible with all Windows® mass storage class drivers and also supports USB Attached SCSI (UAS) for maximum performance.

The SW6318 is software-compatible with the previously announced SW6316 USB 3.0 to SATA storage controller, allowing customers to leverage their design effort and launch multiple storage products ranging from the low-end consumer to the high-end professional storage markets. Symwave offers customers a complete turn-key software development kit (SDK) solution, including reference design hardware, firmware, software, tools and documentation to speed time-to-market and enable value-added hardware and software customization.

The SW6318 is available immediately and will be released to production in January, 2010.

At CES 2010, Symwave will demonstrate its leading-edge storage controllers and showcase multiple end products based on its USB 3.0 technology, including external hard disk drive (HDD) and solid state drive (SSD) storage solutions.