eSATA Flash Drives For Disaster Recovery
Source: Tom's Guide US | Keywords: eSATA,, USB,, Flash | Themes: Business
3. eSATA Flash Drives For Disaster Recovery
eSATA flash drives can be ideal for emergency recovery because they write so much faster than standard USB 2.0 flash drives. Imagine a scenario where your laptop won’t boot due to a hard drive failure. You could plug in an emergency eSATA flash drive with an operating system on it, boot your system from this drive, and save your own neck. Or, imagine a situation where a friend or co-worker’s computer becomes infected with a virus at a critical moment. Remove that computer’s hard drive, boot from your eSATA flash drive, and your friend is back in business. Or, boot from the eSATA flash drive, remove the virus, and restore the system to service.
But before you can use your eSATA flash drive to its fullest potential, you’ve got to prep it. You can install a Preinstall Environment setup or an entirely functional operating system for emergency access. You can use any of the many preinstallation environments, like Windows Vista, Windows XP, and many Linux distributions. With these, you get a fully functional operating system but without actually having to install it. Due to the nature of eSATA, however, you can expand this beyond the creation of a special environment and go right for the fully functional operating system.
For non-XP operating systems, the first step when loading the operating system onto the eSATA device involves disconnecting your current hard disk drive. You then connect the eSATA drive and load the operating system just as if you were putting it on a normal hard drive. Since most eSATA ports are created by using one of the chipset’s SATA ports, the operating system install is not confused by this at all. Once booted into the installer, you just do your normal install.
For XP, you will need to make several changes to the system to make it more flash-drive friendly. These tweaks can lower the number of times your system writes to the flash drive during recovery. Since flash drives have to erase before they can write to any memory location, these tweaks can save considerable time and improve performance.
The first change is to disable the Pre-fetcher in Windows XP. The following registry edits should be completed after making a backup of your registry. By disabling the Prefetcher, 128 default files won't be automatically written during the Windows XP boot process or when an application launches. Without disabling this, the boot process will be slower, as will the writing of files. Disabling it will also lengthen the life of the eSATA flash drive.
Only consider making the tweaks on page 4 if you are comfortable editing Windows XP’s registry. Consider the following instructions for advanced users only.
- Previous page Getting the Most Out of a Flash Drive
- Next page XP Registry Edits for Flash-Friendly...
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.