Kanguru Flash Drive with USB and eSATA

USB drives are getting larger and larger, and it's no longer unusual for people to carry around 16 GB or even 32 GB of data in their pocket.

With these larger drives, though, the limited speeds offered by the USB 2.0 standards have begun to pose a problem, and have led some to wonder whether or not a flash memory stick running over eSATA or FireWire wouldn't be quicker.

Kanguru is the first manufacturer to respond to the challenge, whether their e-Flash drive, sporting a regular USB 2.0 connection at one end and an eSATA connection at the other.

While the write speed is held back by the flash memory chips inside the drive and is therefore only marginally faster--25 MB/s according to Kanguru in place of 20 MB/s for a regular USB drive, the read speeds with eSATA are apparently enormously fast.

Apparetly, we can expect to go from 30 MB/s to an incredibly fast 75 MB/s.

Next Generation USB

It seems an ideal solution while we're waiting for the next generation of USB, version 3.0, to arrive in 2010, bringing speeds of up to 600 MB/s with it.

Things aren't quite as simple as that, though.

For one thing, the e-Flash needs to be plugged in to an external pozwer source if you're using it over eSATA.

Although the 'power over eSATA' standard was announced as long ago as January of this year, it's still not been widele adopted and we have yet to see a computer adopt it. 

However, if you plan to use it on a desktop computer, Kanguru has promised to provide one free powered eSATA port for you to install yourself.

Given these limitations, it seems to us that a solution to the speed problem using FireWire--both more widely available and with no need for a power source--would have been a more sensible option.