use of eSATA connected hard drives for backup

Gents,

I intend to use a eSATA Adaptor card to be installed in my elder PC, and then use eSATA instead of USB 1 for connection of an external hard drive.
Acronis true image 10 or 11 will be used as backup software.

will this work ?
usb 1 needs very long time for completion of one backup process... that is the reason for this.

please assist me - thank you in advance.

brgds Volker

 

I have a seagate external which came with an e-sata card and it works just fine with Acronis 9, 9.1, 10 or 11. Are you buying a drive in a case or buying an external case to take an existing drive ? I have a number of drives which have given me no problem but recently purchased 3 external cases to use with old drives. none are exactly ideal.

 

Hello Long View,
well, this is a plan of mine.
In this moment, I am using an external drive with seagate disk and USB 2 Connection, but my elder PC does not support 2.0 as I learned from the backup time needed. the last complete backup ran about 7 hrs, I startet before going to bed, and it ended just before I stood up the next morning (as I learned from file date on the HD).

I intend to purchase any 3rd party controller card for eSATA and a second external drive with eSATA connectors (I use these things for private purposes, and there is no need for first class parts )

brgds Volker

 

I use an eSATA drive case and drive with my system and True Image 9.1 workstation. When I originally build my system, I had set my onboard SATA controller to IDE mode instead of AHCI mode. That meant the drives were not auto-detected when plugged in - but I just bought a card to upgrade to RAID 0 and was able to change my on-board setting. Everything works perfect now. (My Sonata III case has a front eSATA port that just plugs into the on-board SATA.)

However, add-on cards should by default should be set up for hot-swapping and thus should detect your drive when plugged in.

Just as an aside, I've noticed no difference in file transfer speeds between my internal drives and my eSATA drive. However, when I had a USB 2.0 case, it would crawl. I actually chose to remove the drive from the case and plug it into my computer, using the USB case only to backup my laptop Also, I chose the Antec MX-1 case because it is stylish and actively cooled - however, DIN styled plug on the back is kind of loose and can fall out with a set of bumps. Overall, I am please with it and would recommend that enclosure.

 

@ verbosity, thank you also for your opinion in this matter. What I -sorry for that- not clearly understand is the matter of speed.
Did you experience higher speed on eSATA vs USB2 or something different..

I am running a 1GHz Athlon system 1,4 mb RAM, (K7 architecture), rather old, I know....

brgds Volker

 

I am having the same problem, in that my esata drives appear as IDE drives on the Disk Drive Page of my BIOS. In fact with the esata drives on the boot would hang. My boot drive was my first Sata drive and my second drive was another Sata drive and the eSata drives appeared as 3rd & 4th drives. I discovered by making my Boot Drive the First Drive and the eSata drives my 2nd & 3rd and my other Sata drive as 4th drive I now boot without hanging.

However Acronis does not recognize the two eSata drives. I cannot find anywhere to change them to AHCI as you suggested. Do you have any thoughts about how to solve this problem.

I am using Acronis True Image Home 10

Thanks

Bob

 

I have a raid0-system and i use an esata-drive for backup. the esata is well recognized in acronis -backup, but not when i launch from the recovery-cd, there only the usb-interface is available.
this is not understandable , since the internal drives are visible.

 

By all means, check the Boot CD to ensure that you will be able to restore a backup, bot being able to pick a drive with backup files on it and a target drive to receive the restore. If the Boot CD can't do both of those things -- and just because it can do one doesn't mean it can do the other -- you can't restore and the product will be worthless until Acronis can get the right drivers for the Boot CD to work on your hardware.

 

Most of the reports I've seen show USB 2 running about 16-30 mb with e-sata running roughly nearly double that. Those are not the advertized burst speeds but the actuall times averaged over transfers of lots of bytes. You can find speed reports on these items all over the web.

For restoring, whether e-sata will be faster than USB on how well the linux drivers address the e-sata and whether there is any bottleneck at the bus (say, by using a PCMCIA card to provide the e-sata). If ATI boot CD drivers treat the usb slowly, they might do likewise with the e-sata connection.

For backing up, in windows, the drifvers ought to be pretty up-to-date and the speed diff ought to be measurable.