Pedal to the Metal

OCZ launches fast eSATA-based flash drive.

By Nathan Davis on 5 December, 2008

Flash drives use NAND memory, a cheap and fairly reliable form of non-volatile storage. Although the process of writing to this memory is on the slow side – generally around 15MB/s – it’s comparatively faster when read, oftentimes doubling the rate to around 30MB/s. Unfortunately, because of the inherent technical limitations of NAND memory, USB flash drives are still typically slower than what the bandwidth available to them allows, with USB 2.0 maxing out at 60MB/s.

OCZ's Throttle: Obligatory shot that doesn't show much.So, OCZ has decided to go one step further to improve the situation with its latest flash drive. Not only does it feature read and write speeds of up to 90MB/s and 30MB/s, respectively, it does so via the still fairly exotic eSATA port. Calling it the ‘Throttle eSATA Flash Drive,’ OCZ doesn’t provide a great deal of technical information as to how it achieves this remarkable feat, but we assume this speed boost was made possible via a funky dual channel controller.

What about that slightly more common USB interface? Well, it handles both, thankfully. When an eSATA port isn’t available – which is fairly likely to be often – the drive also supports USB 2.0, featuring a mini USB 2.0 connector. As it has a 50% read increase over 60MB/s, this drive is presumably capable of actually saturating a USB 2.0 line, although OCZ does offer the following warning:

“Rated speeds are based on eSATA bus performance. When used in USB mode, speeds will vary.”

The throttled drive is available in 8GB, 16GB, and 32GB varieties. Unfortunately, no pricing information is yet available, so one can only cross their fingers and hope.

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