The USB flash drive has a competitor with the release of OCZ’s Throttle 32GB eSATA drive.  It may look like your every day thumb drive, but this one plugs into a powered eSATA port.  If you wonder how that might affect your day, consider that Legit Reviews tested the drive by copying 29.3GB worth of files onto the Throttle and an OCZ ATV usb drive and then copied them back.  The Throttle was done in roughly 15 minutes, the OCZ ATV took close to an hour.

“The removable storage benchmark in Sandra 2009 SP2 showed the OCZ Throttle eSATA drive is insanely quick when compared to USB 2.0 flash drives. The OCZ ATV 32GB USB Flash drive was one of the fastest drives we have ever benchmarked, but it looked slow when comparing it to the OCZ Throttle. With ‘Write’ speeds that were 4.65MB/Sec and ‘Read’ speeds of 25.30MB/Sec the old ATV series drive is still fast, but new technology has finally surpassed what we would once consider one of the fasted drives on the market. The new OCZ Throttle eSATA drive had an impressive ‘Write’ speed of 58.04MB/Sec when used with a eSATA port and 29.63MB/Sec when used with a USB 2.0 port. With a 256kb file size our testing shows that you get double the ‘Read’ performance by using eSATA over USB on the same device. The ‘Write’ performance results showed a 65% performance gain by using eSATA over USB, so hands down eSATA is the way to go if you are moving a large number of files…”

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