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• 32 GB, eSATA/USB: Maxell Solid State Drive

  Maxell’s eSATA / USB 2.0 combo drive was announced as early as October 2008 and hit the European retail market at the start of 2009. The product is available in various markets today (Ed.: unfortunately, not the North American market, it seems). We took a look at the 32 GB capacity drive. Like the two other eSATA-based products in this roundup, the Maxell thumb drive utilizes the JMB362 controller by JMicron and has the same chassis design, but is different inside. Read access times vary between 0.6 and 0.9 ms depending on the interface you choose (you can connect the drive via USB 2.0 using a USB 2.0 cable or eSATA by connecting it directly into any eSATA port). As mentioned earlier in this article, you will have to connect the USB 2.0 cable in order to provide power to the drive, unless you have an eSATA port already powered by an additional, integrated USB 2.0 pinout. Some motherboards come with these ports, although this has never been officially specified. The drive worked properly in both eSATA and USB 2.0 modes. eSATA provides a peak bandwidth of 52.7 MB/s, while USB 2.0 operation maxes out at 26.8 MB/s; the latter is still a nice result, though. Effective data transfer rates range from 48 to 51 MB/s for eSATA sequential reads, and 29 to 45 MB/s for sequential writes. Compared to USB 2.0 performance at 26 MB/s read and 20-26 MB/s write throughput, this is a significant performance increase. Maxell positions the eSATA thumb drive being a “portable solution for your SSD needs,” which sounds about right to us. Effectively, the Maxell eSATA thumb drive performs like a 2-3 year old hard drive, and that performance level is still sufficient for many applications, such as working with project data off a mobile device. Unfortunately, poor availability in North America makes it more difficult to actually buy/use.

• 32 GB Silicon Power eSATA/USB SSD

  The third and final eSATA thumb drive in this review is Silicon Power’s eSATA/USB SSD. We can’t help but criticize the branding of this product, as it technically just carries a description, but no real product name or intuitive model number—you’ll have to go to the Solid State Drive section on the Silicon Power Web site to even find this product. We looked at the eSATA/USB model with 32 GB capacity. Unfortunately, Silicon Power doesn’t provide much information, such as alternative capacities, with one exception. The manufacturer reveals that the eSATA/USB drives are based on four-channel flash memory. There is even an eSATA/USB II drive, which appears like its predecessor, but the amount of information provided doesn’t tell us more than the specified throughput (90-50 MB/s on eSATA, 30-20 MB/s on USB 2.0).  At least effective performance was nice, at up to 65 MB/s read throughput over eSATA and 42 MB/s for writes. Although the Silicon Power eSATA/USB thumb drive utilizes the same JMicron JMB362 controllers as the Maxell and OCZ drives, it performs differently. Read throughput is at the same level as the OCZ Throttle (65 MB/s maximum), but Maxell beats all the others when it comes to writes. Silicon Power is almost as fast, while OCZ falls behind. Silicon Power is second fastest in workstation I/O, and in the Web server benchmark, but only third in the file server discipline. Should you be looking for an external SSD solution, the eSATA/USBSSD from Silicon Power might be the best choice.  

• High-Security Flash Storage

  If you think of flash memory, people typically think of USB memory sticks or memory cards for digital cameras and camcorders. But the potential applications for flash have expanded tremendously. The media started off as non-volatile memory for firmware on PCs and consumer electronics devices. It then became an ultra-portable storage technology that conquered the PC and consumer electronics sectors at their intersection in multiple formats, such as compact flash or SD. It has finally reached a state of development in which flash-based solid state disks (SSDs) can even outperform conventional hard drives (at the expense of capacity). However, having access to your most important data wherever you go will be one of the key goals in coming years, and we see ultra-portable flash memory devices meeting this demand until the day when wireless networks such as GSM, 3G, WiMAX or WLAN become completely ubiquitous. But still, users will always likely want to have a storage device that can securely hold all of their key data, which they can take with them wherever they go. (Compare Prices on Corsair Flash Survivor 4 GB) While competition in the memory sector is fierce, some brands have managed to carve out a good reputation: G.skill, Mushkin, OCZ, Patriot and Supertalent are well known for their top-of-the-line enthusiast products. Other such as A-Data, Buffalo, Crucial, GeIL or Kingston offer outstanding products as well. Corsair, which was the first memory vendor to offer overclocking products back in the times of first-generation SDRAM, is considered the number-one player in this business and tries to transfer its reputation into other product areas. Flash memory products seem to be suitable to expand member vendors’ product portfolios, as they’re based on technologies that are not only attractive to PC enthusiasts, but also to less-technical PC users. The Flash Voyager was Corsair’s first USB flash memory stick, which is available in capacities of 2 GB to 32 GB today. Flash Voyager GT is the high-performance product that is only available with a capacity of 16 GB, while delivering throughput beyond 20 MB/s. While most USB Flash memory vendors offer smaller and smaller products, some focus on offering robust and secure solutions. This is exactly what Corsair attempts to do with its Flash Survivor series, which combines robustness with data security features. Join our discussion on this article!