Mountain View-based LucidPort Technology has fired a 'world's first' round by saying it has started to ship the USB300, the first USB 3.0 to SATA bridge controller. The new chip, which is able to link a SATA hard or solid state drive to a USB 1.1/2.0/3.0 host, features SATA Native Command Queuing (NCQ) support, AES 128/256 encryption, and provides transfer speeds of 210 MB/s when using the Windows Mass Storage driver, with even higher speeds being possible with the USB Attached SCSI (UAS) driver.

Fujitsu, PLX and Faraday Electronics are expected to release their own USB 3.0 to SATA bridge chips later this year.