Thumb Drives: Introducing 128 GB USB And High-Speed eSATA

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.

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