The Throttle is being marketed as an eSATA flash drive, which it is, but it does have a mini USB 2.0 port for those of you without an eSATA connection. This is where the USB cable we mentioned earlier comes in, but for two reasons. As we just said, the cable is there for data connectivity, but as we also mentioned previously, in order for the OCZ Throttle to work in an eSATA interface, the drive needs power. If the eSATA connection you have on your motherboard or case is not powered, you will need to plug the USB cable into the Throttle (while it is in an eSATA port) and connect the other end into a USB port for power.

At this time, you're not going to find any powered eSATA ports on existing motherboards on the market. The SATA standards committee is still ratifying this, so you will be forced to carry the USB cable around with you if you wish to plug it into an eSATA connection. 

Testing

We will be testing the OCZ Throttle eSATA Flash Drive using real-world file transfers. The test bed will be an i7 965 Extreme, MSI X58 motherboard, a Seagate 7200.11 1TB drive and 6GB of Corsair Dominator. The OS is Vista 64-Bit, all recent updates and SP1 applied.

We will be testing small file transfer, large file transfer and a large single file. For the small files, we have 12 CBR files (The Watchmen), each roughly 17MB for a total of 198MB. For the large file, we have 4 episodes of The Sopranos, each roughly 450MB for a total of 1.88GB. For the single file, we using a downloaded movie trailer for Terminator Salvation, weighing in at 142GB.

Files will be copied from the hard drive to the OCZ Throttle (write) and after clearing the clipboard, copied from the Throttle back to the hard drive. Comparison drives will be a 4GB Flash Voyager, OCZ Rally 2 Turbo and the Throttle itself, except in USB mode.

Write Tests

Read Tests

Final Words

Clearly, the  is a speed demon. In USB mode, the drive performed on par with the OCZ Rally 2 Turbo, making it amongst the faster USB based drives we've tested. In eSATA mode, it just leaves everyone behind. In the small file tests, the Throttle was almost 100% faster than it's closest competitor. The Corsair drive was trumped very badly, but in its defense it isn't one of the high-speed rated ones. that said, it was in the large file transfers we see the OCZ Throttle really flex some muscle. The results are also consistent with OCZ's speed claims, and in fact we saw a burst read speed of 289.2MB/sec in the large file transfer.

With this much speed, it's hard to find any shortcomings. For those of you who do not have eSATA ports, the Throttle still has value as it does have USB. In case any of you are wondering, yes, if you put data on the drive via eSATA, you can read it with the USB connection and vice versa. That benefit is also its shortcoming as OCZ does not include any sort of pouch or convenient velcro to bundle up the USB cable. This doesn't really impact portability that much as the cable isn't 15 feet long or anything close to that, but it isn't obviously as convenient as plugging in the drive and moving off with it. This will hopefully change soon and we'll see powered eSATA ports on motherboards. 

Otherwise, for anyone looking at the fastest, truley portable storage solution, the  is something to really consider. Be it USB or eSATA, the Throttle gets the job done... quickly.