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

Throughput Results

Silicon Power and OCZ seem to be using similar flash configurations, as they perform alike in eSATA mode—the difference is only 1-2 MB/s—while Maxell falls a bit behind. Using USB 2.0 shows OCZ and Kingston doing the best job, followed by Maxell and Silicon Power, which do not take advantage of USB 2.0’s maximum speed.

Although Maxell failed to impress in the read tests, it dominates in writes, together with Silicon Power. In this test, the 8 GB OCZ drive falls behind, especially in minimum transfer rates, in which it drops to only 13.7 MB/s on eSATA. Hence, it does not truly seem to be capitalizing on the eSATA interface for write operations. Most other drives write quicker, especially the Maxell device and Silicon Power’s thumb drive.

Interface performance determines the peak throughput of each device/interface.