Five eSATA Drives Reviewed

[ronjor]

-{ Quote: "It's a wonder we ever even used serial ports. Back in the dark days of computing, external devices connected to the PC via these 9-pin (or, arbitrarily, 25-pin) ports through which data crawled at, oh, around 300 bits per second. That's bits. If you had to copy, say, a 50 kb file via a 300 "baud" serial connection, it would take more than 20 minutes.

We bring that up because today, we're watching the much more modern USB 2.0 port, as a data conduit, reach the end of its life. As a connector for peripherals it's fine, but after you read this report, you'll realize that external-serial ATA, or eSATA, is the future of the external hard drive connection. " }-Article (http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,2173840,00.asp)

[FanJ]

Hi Ron,

Thanks for the info and link.

Recently I did read an article in the Dutch magazine c't (issue september 2007) about eSATA.
http://www.fnl.nl/ct/
The Dutch version of the magazine c't is more or less a translated one of the German magazine c't.

First I need to say that I'm no expert on this.
What I understood from that article is that there are still some problems.

First:
As for "piping" an internal SATA port through the case.
Connectors and cables for SATA are not designed for this purpose.
There is a limit to the length of such cable.
And there could be a problem because of Electrostatic Discharge (ESD).
You can have luck but the article discourages this use.

Connectors:
The connectors for SATA and eSATA are different.

Cables:
eSATA cables are better shielded against ESD, and can be longer than SATA cables.

Hot-plugging:
eSATA drives can be used in theory for hot-plugging, but in fact there are still problems. Maybe better drivers will solve this.
You would expect that it will go as for USB-2 external drives: Windows gives the option "hardware safely remove" (unfortunately I don't know the exact English expression as I use the Dutch version of Windows). Depending on Windows version, host-adaptor, motherboard-chipset, etc., this might work OK or not.

Linux and Apple:
You might encounter problems.