USB 3.0 and SATA 3 arrive!

Although we tend to favor EVGA when it comes to choosing motherboards, Gigabyte and ASUS occasionally offer new tech a bit before EVGA, and this is the case with the new USB and SATA bus speeds. The Ion build page now includes an option for the Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD6 on the Ion, and the Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD5 on the Fury. Hopefully EVGA will follow suit soon.

Are the new bus speeds worthwhile?

USB 3 + SATA 3 does indeed produce significant transfer speed increases - moving data from a USB 3 external drive to an internal SATA 3 drive is about three times as fast as using a USB 2 port.

Bear in mind that Windows 7 does not yet seem to have support for booting off of some or all of the SATA3 controllers currently available, so don't get too excited about a SATA3 RAID 0 boot volume just yet...