AMP Releases Speedy eSATA Flash Drive
PrintIt would be easy to confuse Active Media Product's (AMP) new external flash drive for a USB key, right up until you tried to jam the sucker into a USB port. That's because its an eSATA drive in thumbstick casing.
"There are millions of laptops out there with eSATA ports that can take advantage of this performance," commented Jerry Thomson, VP of Sales at Active Media Products.
The performance numbers Thomson is referring to fills up the spec sheet with up 100MB/s read and 55MB/s write speeds, making it about three times faster than the fastest USB 2.0 flash drives, AMP says.
Don't have an eSATA port yet? Not to worry, says AMP, who points out that their new drives also come with a Mini USB 2.0 port "so they can be used in virtually any PC or desktop."
The new drives are available now in 16GB ($70) and 32GB ($110) capacities.
Image Credit: Active Media Products
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damicatz
March 23, 2010 at 12:22pm
eSata is still superior to USB 3.0 for a number of reasons :
1.USB has additional overhead caused by having to translate SCSI commands (the USB Block Device protocol emulates SCSI) into SATA/ATA commands.
2.USB is still host based which means it requires more attention from the processor to arbitrate transfers (although USB 3.0 has improved on that defect somewhat)
3.USB 2.0 never approached anywhere near 480mb/s real-world transfer speeds and USB 3.0 will never approach anywhere near 4.8gb/s. There is a difference between actual bandwidth and throughput. Once you factor in all of the overhead involved in the USB protocol, you would be lucky to get half of that speed.
4.eSata is a low-level protocol without any additional abstractions or translations that have to be performed by the CPU. That allows the use of low-level features like SMART.
Keith E. Whisman
March 23, 2010 at 7:31am
this would be awesome for readyboost or even a hidden drive plugged into the back of your desktop. Use this drive to keep all your porn and stuff on it and when your done you can just hide it and password protect it so if the wife or kids find it they'll never know what's on it.
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