Back in the early days of the computer if you needed to carry data files with you from one machine to the other you used floppy discs. The floppy gave way to the CD and DVD as a method for moving files form one computer to another and taking data with you on the road. As those methods became a paid for computer users, a new type of storage device emerged — the flash drive.

Today flash drives can be used for all sorts of things form backing up data from your computer to carrying files with you from desk to desk or office to office. The flash drive is growing in capacity, but with the majority of flash drives using USB they aren’t growing in performance much.

That changed when OCZ introduce its latest flash drive called the OCZ Throttle. The Throttle offers USB connectivity and has an eSATA connection as well offering roughly twice the performance of USB. If you have been looking for a flash drive that offers fast transfer speeds and a large capacity, the OCZ Throttle may be just what you need.

Specifications

The Throttle is available in several capacities including 8GB, 16GB, and 32GB sizes. All of the storage capacities share the same design measuring 79.1mm L x 29.9mm W x 10.3mm H. OCZ promises a read speed of up to 90MB/sec and a write speed of up to 30MB/sec. The drive includes a mini USB cable that allows USB connectivity on computers without eSATA ports.

Benchmarks

To test the performance of my 32GB OCZ Throttle review unit I used an application called HD Tune to test the read speed of the drive in both USB and eSATA modes. The average read speed in USB mode was 28.4MB/sec. The average read speed in eSATA mode for the Throttle was 79.5 MB/sec, more than twice the speed of the drive in USB mode.

I also moved a large folder of documents totaling 5.46 GB to and from the Throttle and timed the process with a stop watch. In USB mode, it took 3 minutes and 10 seconds to move the folder from the flash drive to the PC. To move the same folder form the PC to the flash drive took 4 minutes and 26 seconds. In eSATA mode, moving the folder from the PC to the flash drive took 2 minutes and 23 seconds. Moving the folder from the flash drive to the Pc took 1 minute and 29 seconds. You can see at a glance that the eSATA performance is much better than the USB performance.

In Use

The size of the throttle flash drive is a bit larger than the average flash drive to make room for the needed hardware inside to support eSATA. I found that the drive was too fat to fit into the slightly recessed front eSATA port on my desktop computer, but it did fit without issues into the eSATA port on my laptop. It’s important to note here that the USB cable is pretty much required to carry around with the Throttle. Many of the eSATA ports you find on computers today are not powered. That means that you have to plug the Throttle into the eSATA port and then plug the USB cable into a USB port for power.

The USB cable included with the Throttle is only about a foot long and on large notebooks with eSATA ports and USB ports on opposite sides of the machine that may mean the cord is too short. Overall, the Throttle is a great flash drive offering tons of storage and blazing fast speeds. In eSATA mode, the Throttle is by far the fastest flash drive I have ever tested.

Pros

• Fast transfer speeds
• Lots of storage

Cons

• Short USB cable
• Drive is too fat for some eSATA ports