Supercharge Your Flash Drive with eSATA : An eSATA Flash Drive Market is Born
Source: Tom's Guide US | Keywords: eSATA,, USB,, Flash | Themes: Business
1. An eSATA Flash Drive Market is Born
As the flash drive market approaches its saturation point, discerning consumers are starting to notice the limitations of these little storage sticks. Annual flash drive sales total about $2.66 billion and over 171 million units, but the market’s growth is expected to drop from around 25% per year to less than 15%. There is also a glut of NAND flash memory in retail channels, which is causing their prices to drop and capacities to rise. Meanwhile, flash drive manufacturers haven’t stepped up with many innovations.
Part of the problem with flash drives’ lack of features is due to the limited speeds of the USB standard. But recently, several vendors have attempted to solve the innovation problem by integrating a combination eSATA-and-USB interface to the devices in hope that the eSATA standard will give some oomph to these sluggish devices.
We put three flash drives through the paces to see how much eSATA really can help to improve USB drives’ storage read-and-write speeds.
The Limits of USB
Users of flash drives (also known as jump or thumb drives) are limited by the USB interface. The speed of NAND flash memory varies and, understandably, manufacturers don’t pack their highest-quality NAND chips into cheap flash drives. The USB 2.0 transfer rate is capped at 480 Mb/s. With eSATA and USB combo drives, the USB bottleneck is removed.
eSATA to the Rescue
eSATA flash drives should be able to transfer data at the rate of 300 MB/s, which represents a five-fold increase compared to USB’s data-transfer rate of 60 MB/s. These speeds are theoretical, but at least one solid-state drive, the Intel X25, has reached close to 300 MB/s. As long as vendors put this level of flash memory in their eSATA flash drives, we expect to see a big improvement in performance from these devices.
eSATA is also seeing wide-scale rollout in the PC sector. Almost every desktop computer chipset available already supports eSATA unpowered ports, while laptops from Acer, Asus, Fujitsu, Gateway, HP, MSI, and Toshiba offer powered eSATA ports (MacBook’s, MacBook Pro and MacBook Air lack support for eSATA). So today, it is easy to find a PC to purchase that has eSATA. But does eSATA offer any kind of performance boost that you will notice?
- Next page Getting the Most Out of a Flash Drive
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.