Getting the Most Out of a Flash Drive
Source: Tom's Guide US | Keywords: eSATA,, USB,, Flash | Themes: Business
2. Getting the Most Out of a Flash Drive
We all know the story of how flash drives usurped larger storage media because of their portability. Flash has, in many cases, replaced CD, DVD, and hard drives. Their durability and constant increases in capacity add to their appeal. The addition of eSATA will, in our opinion, increase this appeal.
eSATA Flash Drives for Computer Backup
We typically use a USB flash drive to back up documents, while we use a larger USB hard drive to back up the rest of our computer system. But is it now practical to use an eSATA flash drive for PC backups on a regular basis?
We first tested backups with an eSATA flash drive–OCZ's Throttle drive–by inserting the drive into a USB 2.0 port on a machine with Windows Vista’s SP 1. We used a program called Allway Sync as part of our backup system, but you might use another piece of software. You configure the software to Autolaunch when your eSATA flash drive is inserted. Here’s a screenshot of our software that configures syncing.
We decided to test the difference between the OCZ Throttle’s eSATA port and its USB 2.0 port. As a test file, we used a 4.33 GB folder of an Ubuntu Linux image. We used Allway Sync to sync this folder from the computer to the eSATA OCZ Throttle flash drive. It took 2 minutes and 15 seconds to complete the job.
We then deleted the file and performed the same sync with OCZ Throttle’s USB 2.0 interface. That operation took 3 minutes and 30 seconds, which was a difference of 1 minute and 15 seconds. What kind of time savings would that add up to over the course of a year in your life?
eSATA Flash Drives For Capturing Streaming Media
eSATA flash drives might be useful for capturing video, live music, or other streaming music. After all, if you’ve ever tried using a USB interface to do this, then you’ve probably come to the conclusion that USB can’t handle these larger files at a fast enough rate to make smooth video. You might have gotten better results with FireWire. We gave it a try with eSATA.
Granted, your camcorder does not have an eSATA interface, but your desktop does. You can stream video from your TV tuner, camcorder, or music from your digital sound card, straight to the eSATA drive, which has data writing speeds that are fast enough for this task. This should allow you to capture media directly on a flash drive from any source.
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wait for usb 3.0
Sata IO(6.0Gb/s) is available this year. USB 3.0(4.8Gb/s) not ready til 2010
USB 3.0 is slated to support up to 4.8Gbps, eSATA supports up to 3.0Gbps now. SATA 6Gb/s is approved so that should also trickle down to eSATA. Since current USB suffers from a loss due to overhead of 25% the new 3.0 USB must be more effecient to compete with SATA 3 GB/s. It should also be noted that eSATA can support RAID and other HDD type features not available in USB devices. This could get interesting.
I doubt 3.0 will be able to compete. It still uses the host CPU for low level protocol processing, and thus, will never reach it's max bandwidth outside of the theoretical.
I doubt even USB 3.0 will be able to out preform even SATA 3 GB/s in real world testing.
Currently USB has a loss of about 25% due to overhead. If that loss continues then it would perform at 3.6 Gb/s. I think if eSATA flash and HDD if they can get powered eSATA ports in more than laptops, could really take off now and not wait until 2010 for USB 3.0.
Thanks for the article but why is it on Toms Guide and not Toms Hardware? Even your own charts use the Toms Hardware logo!
JeanLuc,
So sorry to confuse you! External USB (and, now, eSATA) thumb drives are definitely a Tom's Guide consumer electronics product. Apologies for the logo confusion.
Rachel Rosmarin
Editor of Tom's Guide
Even on USB, those drive put my drives to shame
Now if only they'd start selling them here!
I have a Throttle and for unknown reasons it DOES not run at 90mb/s on an exresscard esata setup. Tried several machines. All I could get is 40mb/s. Maybe esata from the MB would be faster. Need to try it.
Hey bobo0, I could not get the Throttle or other to 90MB/sec even with the internal SATA connector on a motherboard. I could get 75-80 very consistently on my laptops and desktops so do not be discouraged. Try disabling any power management on your laptop as I experienced much slower performance when power management was set to give the most battery life.
Not sure how 6.2 was obtained on Windows Experience rating, since the scale goes from 1.0 to 5.9:
http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/w [...] 61033.mspx
Not sure how 6.2 was obtained on Windows Experience rating, since the scale goes from 1.0 to 5.9:http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/w [...] 61033.mspx
if you had cared to read you're own link, you would have seen this:
6.2 was in Windows 7 and there is a screen shot of it shown. So obviously it does go higher now. Thanks for pointing that out.
I got a few pings on where to find the RiData unit. It is at
http://www.amazon.com/Ridata-RDESS [...] 469&sr=8-1
You can find the OCZ and Kanguru unit is at www.kanguru.com
Hey everyone, I wanted to let you know that Kanguru Solutions is working hard to resolve their issue and watch for them to rebound with a faster drive soon.
find another place to buy:
http://www.allstarshop.com/shop/pr [...] 25D2CQAAC9
For anyone interested, Kanguru system is releasing a new version of their flash drive. It will use a newer interface to speed up the read and write access of their drive. They are saying that the issue seen here was that they were first to market and had an older PCB that proved to be slower. Watch for this update.
Kanguru Solutions has updated their eSATA e-Flash drive as a direct result of our Tom’s Guide article.
As a direct result of our testing, Kanguru Solutions learned they were using an older version of the eSATA controller on the flash drive. This accounted for their slower performance during our test. They have corrected the issue and their performance is now equal to or greater than the other two drives. Testing using the eSATA interface showed random access went from 0.4 to 0.2 ms, average read went from 66.7 to a new high of 80.8 MB/sec, average write want from 48 to 52.6 MB/sec. This resolves all the issue with the eSATA e-Flash drive making it a top performer with the best package.