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Today we are checking out a clever little flash drive that can halve the time it takes to back up your important data or transport files to another system. Whereas traditional portable flash memory is limited to the USB interface, the OCZ Throttle can utilize eSATA for greater performance... The USB (Universal Serial Bus) standard has provided users with quick and easy access to numerous devices such as cameras and MP3 players over the years. With the introduction of USB 2.0 the standard also became quick enough to be used for accessing flash media and even hard drives. However we are now getting to a point where USB 2.0 is no longer sufficient. Given that an 8GB flash drive is now considered to be small, the need for a much faster interface is now upon us.  Although USB 3.0 is right around the corner, promising significant improvements over USB 2.0, it will still be some time before this new interface is widely supported. It is impressive to look at the head way USB has made over the years. For example, to fill a 16GB flash drive using USB 1.0 it would take roughly 6 hours, where as USB 2.0 could do it in just under 9 minutes. USB 3.0 promises to fill 16GB’s in just under a minute, which is pretty spectacular. Although USB 2.0 claims a throughput of 480Mbit/s, which works out to be 60MB/s, it cannot upload and download simultaneously as it is only half duplex. This means that USB 2.0 will limit flash drives and hard drives using the interface to roughly 30MB/s, which is why it takes almost 9 minutes to fill 16GB’s. While this may not sound like a long time, try watching the progress bar for 9 minutes, it’s much like watching grass grow. Then you have to consider bigger devices that range from 32GB’s and up which could take significantly longer. In fact today’s review item, being the OCZ Throttle 32GB, would take around 18 minutes to completely fill using USB 2.0, which is a bit of a problem. Therefore OCZ has decided to address this issue by using the eSATA interface instead. The greatest benefit here is speed, as the eSATA interface can transfer up to 300MB/s and with this kind of bandwidth we would expect the OCZ Throttle to be the limiting factor here, not the bus. The obvious down sides to using eSATA is that not all eSATA ports are self powered and not all systems support eSATA. However OCZ has been clever enough to overcome these issues by making the Throttle a hybrid eSATA/USB 2.0 device. |
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