With the recent developments in the world of flash memory, the companies saw USB 2.0 flash drives that can’t deliver the bandwidth due to the limitations within the standard.

eSATA gets more portable storage in the shape of OCZ Throttle

As far as our record go, OCZ is the only company that experimented with FireWire 800 flash drives and now the company launched eSATA flash drive. Under the name OCZ Throttle eSATA, this “eStick” is offering fantastic performance, 90 MB/s read and 30 MB/s write.

There are three Throttle models, 8GB, 16GB and the 32GB one, all featuring identical performance characteristics.

What happens if your computer doesn’t feature eSATA port? Answer is simple – Throttle comes with mini-USB 2.0 connector as well. You have to use the USB-2-miniUSB cable, but the option is there. But with ASUS and Toshiba implementing eSATA ports onto their notebooks, and the abudance of motherboards with eSATA ports, this technology has some serious potential. Products are arriving on market just in time for Christmas shopping extragavanzza.

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Can this device put Blu-ray on a map as viable backup solution?

OWC Mercury Pro is external Blu-ray burner, but it features e-SATA port. Yep, you’ve read it correctly – it does come with FireWire 400 and 800, USB 2.0, but it also comes with e-SATA port, meaning you can burn 50GB of data at a speed of 1GB/min, instead of almost two hours of dwelling through USB connector. I own Sony’s BWU-100A in internal IDE and external USB version, and it is a drag burning 50GB for more than an hour. E-SATA enables burning at the maximum speed of SATA 1.0 spec, which is 150MB/s, so no more 40 MB/s through USB 2.0 (USB 2.0 can do 60MB/s? Yeah, right.), or FireWires which aren’t exactly… fiery.

E-SATA is the way to go, and these guys are offering this piece of hardware for 500 bucks. Given that my Sony cost over a grand a while ago, this is a fair value. And yes, this finally brings decent Blu-ray drive to Mac systems, which are traditionally lagging behind PC in terms of hardware connectivity. Since St. Jobs finally added e-SATA connector on latest series of MacBooks, you can get this device and have decent storage capabilities.

The device supports reading HD-DVD media as well… so time to back up my 100+ HD DVD movies is here. And with a help of Badaboom Pro beta, I might even put the GTX280 to a good use, instead of waiting for weeks on a CPU.There are two models available (http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/optical-drives/), one without Roxio Toast 9 Titanium (MacOS X), and one with. The difference is 80 bucks, so have phun.

If OWC dares to send the device for a review, they can be sure I’ll check their claims of 1GB/min write speed.

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