▲ ▼ External storage with hardware compression
Those who had to compress large assorted data and transfer it to external storage would have experienced large waiting times, once for compression and again for transfer.
Modern CPUs have have hardware based compression for multimedia(Video) in the form of instruction sets such as MMX, SSE, AVX; but lacks general purpose compression accelerators.
Hardware based compression could accelerate compression and transfer of data. Enterprise infrastructure have had hardware accelerated compression in the form of PCIe based adapters, cards, Network accelerators.
Still, a USB/Thunderbolt based USB storage with ASIC(Application-specific integrated circuit)/FPGA(Field-programmable gate array) based compression accelerators could add value to both enterprise and general consumers.
Microsoft is developing an ASIC that does data compression: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/improved-cloud-service-performance-through-asic-acceleration/
"Today, we announce the companion technology to Project Zipline — Project Corsica. Over two years in the making, Corsica is our ASIC implementation of Zipline technology. It delivers Zipline’s first rate performance in compression, encryption, and data authentication, all accelerated in a special purpose ASIC developed by Microsoft in collaboration with Broadcom."
Adding compression to consumer products increase cost. I don't see the companies are rushing to add this feature any time soon.
Sure, it would increase the price but the question is whether the performance improvement justifies it (like any computing hardware performance costs) i.e. Whether the customer is willing to pay X times the price for Y reduction in transfer time.
So far the improvement of speed is form usb1 to usb2 to now usb3. I think the interface improvement is much faster and drastic. Because it is standard, the cost is cheaper after the transition. Most consumers don't know the difference between useb2 and usb3. So they are not going to pay extra for a bit more speed improvement from the hard compression. That is why it is a enterprise need.
I feel that's an underestimation of consumer intelligence, people who need better transfer rate are buying computers with thunderbolt interface over USB 3.x by paying a premium.
Ignore this. I posted the any comment twice. But there is no button to delete it. The site's feature and usability need to improve a bit:-)
Did the comment get posted twice automatically when clicked ADD COMMENT or did you post the comment twice manually by mistake?
My internet is a bit slow these couple days. So maybe I clicked twice. Not sure:-)
Can you reduce the padding/margin between comments?:-) There are so much more spacing than the text:-)
Thank you. I will keep an eye on this. Your feedback is appreciated and I welcome you to suggest more features and keep track of feature updates at needgap's meta discussion.