The problem with eSATA would be the connectors. It would defeat the purpose of portability if you can't find ports to connect it. Might as well look forward to USB 3.0.

masterjaw 1+^

the eSATA has some nice performance but if it requires a power cable, then why not get an external harddrive which will have an alot better space/$$$ ratio.

or we could just wait till USB3.0 comes out

There's also a 256gb Kingston flash stick out now:
http://www.kingston.com/ukroot/flash/dt300.asp

But far too expensive at $1500 AUD

I personally like the Silicon Power drive. Offers all the storage I need for quick portable needs, and isn't too far off of a external HDD. Sounds like something I would pump my OS on.

What about USB RAID 0 setups? I have come accross it before, and thus want to see it on several of these Silicon Power drives to get SSD performance. ^_^

Ouch. =/

I don't like this comparison.
The comparison is totally wrong. SSD drives/memory and USB sticks work differently. SSD memory has an additional controller with buffering and RAM to speed up transfers. USB sticks do not. So its obvious that eSATA SSD performs better than USB sticks.

I bought the OCZ Throttle 16 gb to see if the Ready Boost performance was superior through esata, but I've not seen a difference(didn't use ready boost before at all) in benchmarks and haven't noticed one in real life either.

Still, nice to use my unused esata port!

I wish that eSATA+USB ports would become officially supported by both SATA-IO and USB forum groups. It is a great idea, and solves a lot of problems for hybrid devices like these. And hybrid ways of this socket also solve many problems for eSATA like power and backward compatibility. USB forum has less (if any) benefits for accepting it, but "legalizing" this would be just a big plus for the general consumers.

Great read.

I'd be interested in a smaller once of these, 8gb ocz sounds about what I'd need and use it for caching. Firefox cache and things of that nature.

I'm surprised that ready boost didn't improve but possibly you're running with a lot of system memory anyway @ inmtaxi ? It wouldn't really have much of an effect at all in that case.

So as a caching decide, the esata is the way to go?

I haven't seen any of these in the stores yet here in the UK but would love to try one, what are the prices like for the ocz models?

This is more like it........usb at one end & sata at the other....http://www.kanguru.com/eflash.html#

It pricey, $54 for the 16 gb at tigerdirect, $32 for the 8 gb. I got 1.99 postage because my total purchase > $100 ...

I run 4 gb ocz ddr2 1200 with raid 0 wd blacks (2x 640 gb)

I would rather wait for USB 3 with the same performance, but with backwards compatibility with all existing computers.

USB 3 won't do any good for me until I upgrade my motherboard, and by then we'll have eSata 3 ... I wish eSata was more widely adapted.

When I buy a new laptop eSata is a near must have requirement, unless I see a super deal without it.

Ah if only those dollars just converted to UK pounds I'd be happy but usually the dollar price gets increased a lot or even doubled coming over here (weeps)

So my guess for the 8gb ocz would be around $60-60 for us. I'm still tempted, been after a solution for caching permanently for a long time. Ramdisks always create problems, eating into system memory and a hassle to keep it permanent and not just dissapear on reboot.

As for USB3, I think I'm a few years away from that. Motherboard wont need upgrading till then so that's a no go for me.

Grims - this IS backwards compatible with all your computers! Unless you've missed it - it work with USB 2.0, which is exactly compatibility you're looking for. eSATA is just for extra speed if your MBO has it. And if you've bought computer in last year or so, you probably already have eSATA on your MBO, so no need to wait for USB3.0 to get out, and than another year before they start producing USB drives with 3.0, MBOs with 3.0, and buying new MBO just so you can have speedier portable storage.

These things are real nice looking, but - unfortunately, not available where I live at the moment... so best I can do is buy an external 2.5" drive that has USB+eSATA

USB RAID? ive never heard of it.. how much would that increase performance? sounds like something im gonna be googling today

Did you read the article? It's not trying to find if the USB stick is as fast as the eSata/USB sticks.

I had a go googling around, the idea intrigued me too. It seems you can't do this on Windows, only under Linux and the results are dissapointing unless you fill a certain limited criteria.

It seems that a good use of an array for USB Flash Drives would be if you had 4 slow drives. You could gain huge improvements in transfer speeds with this setup.

However, with faster Flash Drives, the increase hits the ceiling of what USB can offer and being limited to Linux makes the whole idea pointless for me. So a single drive like a Patriot seems like the best way to go for pure USB speeds.

I also did some more research on prices in the UK. I was close enough, you're looking at double the dollar price or to put it another way, almost twice the price of the fastest USB Flash Drives I know of, the Patriots.

$56 for the 16gb OCZ esata against $34 for an 8gb USB only patriot drive. A huge price bump for what essentially boils down to much faster read speed but not much difference in write speed.

I suspect these esata flash drives will stay on my amazon wishlist for sometime

curse the no edit button!

I meant 8gb ocz.

so if I take 6 eSata 128GB flash drives cut off the little l part on the mother board and use the USB headers on my MB I could have a 640GB Raid 5 array that takes up less space than a single HDD?

Sure, but you'd have a Linux only $3000+ 640gb tiny array or looking at it another way, a more money than sense array.