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WD, NEC Link Efforts On Superspeed USB

Lake Forest-based WD, a manufacturer of disk drives, said Thursday that it is in an effort with NEC Electronics to promote the new, SuperSpeed Universal Serial Bus (USB) 3.0 standard. According to the firms, they are in a partnership to develop drivers based on the UASP mass storage protocol, targeted at the hard drive market, which will boost transfer speeds to disk drives by 30 percent. USB 3.0 provides support for data transfer rates of up to 5 gigabits per second. WD and NEC said the new protocol drivers will be used with NEC's USB 3.0 host controllers, and that they will also license the new driver to semiconductor vendors developing similar USB 3.0 chips.