USB 3.0 devices are just now showing up for mass consumption and Super Talent is leading the charge, having just introduced the first USB 3.0 flash drive, which promises transfer rates of up to 320MB/sec.

If you have a USB 3.0 socket, you’ll get speeds up to 200MB/sec. If you use it in a USB 2.0 connector it will slow to USB 2.0 speeds of course. No word on a price or release date, but expect it to ship soon in 32GB, 64GB and 128GB capacities.

Kingston announced today that it was increasing the speed that its DataTraveler 410 flash drive offers. The drive has been upgraded to include up to 32GB of storage and with faster read and write speeds. The drive has read and write speeds of up to 20MB/sec.

That is good performance for a flash drive, assuming it actually hits those speeds in the real world. The faster read and write speeds make the drive more suited to use as a backup device and for moving large files. The drive measures 2.58″ x 0.71″ x 0.41″.

Team has announced a new series of Flash Drives called the Color Turn that they hope will stand out. The drives are available in 2GB, 4GB, 8GB, 16GB and 32GB capacities. They feature a cap-in-body design and a USB 2.0 interface, with maximum read and write speeds of 15MB/s and 8MB/s.

Each drive measures just 55mm x 16mm x 9.1mm and weighs in at 11 grams. These are compatible with most operating systems including Windows ME, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Linux 2.4 and Mac. No word on price or availability just yet though.

If you love racing, you’ll love the Gresso Grand Monaco USB flash drive. If you can afford it that is. Hopefully you don’t have Formula 1 taste with a go-cart budget as 32GB of storage space will cost you $200 for the Classic model.

The Double Security model will set you back $500. They’re constructed of titanium superalloy and high-tech ceramic. Whether you want the Double Security or Classic designs, both feature carbon inserts for that luxury flair.

I remember when flash drives first started to come onto the market. The things at the time had capacities measured in low megabytes. Today the flash drive is a popular and widely adopted device with storage capacity rivaling many SSDs on the market.

Kingston has announced a new flash drive today called the DataTraveler 200, the first 128GB flash drive on the market. The drive features a capless design that uses a retractable USB connector to prevent damage and the user doesn’t have to worry about a lost cap.

One of the problems with using a Mac computer is that many of the devices that Windows users can take advantage of are often not Mac compatible. This is especially true of products like flash drives that use encryption to protect data.

Kingston has announced that its DataTraveler Vault Privacy Edition is now compatible with Mac OSX 10.4x to 10.5x. The drive connects to the computer via a USB port and offers hardware-based data encryption.

Back in the early days of the computer if you needed to carry data files with you from one machine to the other you used floppy discs. The floppy gave way to the CD and DVD as a method for moving files form one computer to another and taking data with you on the road. As those methods became a paid for computer users, a new type of storage device emerged — the flash drive.

Today flash drives can be used for all sorts of things form backing up data from your computer to carrying files with you from desk to desk or office to office. The flash drive is growing in capacity, but with the majority of flash drives using USB they aren’t growing in performance much.

Looks like Apple has announced a new Nehalem based Mac Pro with a starting price of $2,499. The new systems feature your choice of a single core 2.66GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon 3500, or a dual 2.26 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon 5500, start with 3GB of memory, a 640GB hard drive, and the NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 with 512MB of RAM.

The new systems should be available next week online and in stores, so break open your piggy banks and get your credit cards ready.

The memory products folks over at Lexar kicked out two new USB flash drives last week which feature some different design touches. One is the JumpDrive TwistTurn and the other is the JumpDrive Retrax. Both will be available in March 2009.

The JumpDrive Retrax USB flash drive features a capless design with a retractable mechanism that designed to protect the drive and its contents. The TwistTurn USB flash drive, meanwhile, features a capless design of its own, with a rotating case cap that attaches to a keychain or backpack.

I have a gob of flash drives laying around my office, crammed in desk drawers, filling up my penholder and generally getting in my way. I don’t really use flash drives, it seems that companies issue members of the press these things as a sort of initiation. The main reason I don’t use them is that they are rather slow and don’t offer enough storage for a real backup.

OCZ introduced a new flash drive this month called the Throttle that does away with one of the common threads in the flash drive world — the USB connector. Rather than the comparatively pokey USB port, OCZ grafts a full-blown eSATA connector onto the Throttle.

ASUS launched its latest ultraportable notebook today and it’s a looker. The ASUS U2E is an 11-inch notebook weighing only 2.7 pounds and clad in leather. According to ASUS the notebook is hand crafted and designed to appeal to the user’s sense of style.

The U2E claims to be the lightest notebook available with a built-in DVD-RW drive and the system runs on Windows Vista. Since Vista is resource intensive ASUS ships the U2E with 3GB of high-speed DDR2 memory.

NextoDi brought a couple of new products to the PMA show in Las Vegas this year with one of them being an upgraded media storage device with support for eSATA drives and just about every media card you can think of. Until you get your hands on a few 32GB media cards the Nexto Extreme ND2700 works well for transferring and storing data from the smaller media in your digital camera and camcorder while on the go.

The ND2700 also uses NextoDI’s X-Copy technology delivering backup speeds as fast as 40 seconds for 1GB. The USB connection makes transferring data even easier by connecting to your camera directly without having to remove the media card. A sampling of those media cards supported by the Nexto Extreme include CF, SD, SDHC, MMC and a whole array of Memory Sticks. NextoDI didn’t have any information quite yet on pricing or availability.

Even though Apple’s MacWorld is only a week away we wouldn’t expect Jobs and company to just stay quiet during the whole week of CES, patiently waiting for their time. Today Apple unveiled the new Mac Pro and the Xserve both with the ability to be powered by up to 8 processor cores.

The Mac Pro houses two of Intel’s 45nm Quad-Core Xeon processors at up to 3.2GHz giving it twice the power of the prior model. It comes packing a 1600MHz front-side bus and as much as 32GB of 800MHz memory, ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT graphics card with 256MB, dual gigabit Ethernet and 4 available HDD bays that combined can bring 4TB of storage to the new Mac Pro. Also, the number eight is most significant here with processor cores but it’s also the number of 30-inch monitors that can be driven by the computer.

Corsair has released some new versions if its Flash Voyager and Flash Survivor USB drives, both featuring capacities that are pumped up to as much as 32GB each. The Voyager model has a rubberized covering and looks like it might be waterproof, but its not. It’s actually designed to take the occasional drop and keep on ticking, which is really nice if you’re holding 32GB of data or a whole bootable OS in your hand. The Survivor has an aluminum casing and it is actually water resistant, letting you tote your 20 hours of outdoor video through the rain forest without worrying about destroying the data, or something like that.

Buffalo has announced the release of a new flash memory stick that can hold up to an impressive 32GB of data. Your first thought might be to wonder just how long it takes to transfer 32GB of data to the drive through USB. Although it still might not be real quick Buffalo is assuring us that their TurboUSB technology will get the data onboard 20% faster than a standard USB drive.

Since the value of the data stored on a drive usually increases with the amount of data the company has added a little clip to give a little help against losing it and also has a manual “lock” switch to protect the data from being overwritten. The drive will work with just about any OS but Windows users can take advantage of software that will automate backups and provide a password-secured portion of the drive for storing private info.