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The two biggest concerns most users are going to have when buying a USB flash drive is price and performance. Assuming that you need a 32GB flash drive, the budget will be anywhere from $55 US up to $120 US, with quite a large number of options in-between. Decent performance flash drives start at around $80 US, so pricing the OCZ Throttle at $100 is not unreasonable, particularly given it’s the only product to offer eSATA support. Obviously the ability to use the eSATA bus is the Throttle’s ace in the hole, as it allows it to significantly out-perform any and all USB drives, flash or otherwise. When using the USB 2.0 interface the OCZ Throttle is as fast as they come, which means copying a 6GB file will take roughly 3:30 minutes for any high performance USB storage device. Of course the Throttle can make use of eSATA when available, which will almost halve the time it takes to copy a 6GB file. This also allowed the Throttle to rival high performance desktop hard drives, which is something portable flash storage has been unable to do in the past. Therefore in terms of performance, the OCZ Throttle goes unmatched thanks solely to its ability to utilize the eSATA interface. As we mentioned earlier in the review, the eSATA performance does come with one small catch and that being that you will likely need to use a USB cable as well to deliver power. Most eSATA ports are not powered, so a USB cable is required for power. While most people will have a mini-USB cable handy, it will still pay to carry one around just in case, which does make the Throttle a little less portable. Something that we also noticed was that the Throttle comes with a FAT32 partition, meaning that files greater than 4GB will fail to copy onto the drive. The user will be required to delete the FAT32 partition and replace it with an NTSF partition. This is not really a big deal, but it can be a pain if you fill it up with smaller data files first and then realize that the larger files cannot be copied across.
Reviewed By Steven Walton |
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