e.SATA -- anybody know about this?

[bigtiger]

I accidentally bought an e.SATA hard drive enclosure from newegg. I planned to get a USB.

Does anybody know what this enclosure might be used for? why is it good or bad? I wish there could be a PCMCIA e.sata type of thing that will enable me to use this enclosure. It looks very good though.

[tomh009]

I accidentally bought an e.SATA hard drive enclosure from newegg. I planned to get a USB.

Does anybody know what this enclosure might be used for? why is it good or bad? I wish there could be a PCMCIA e.sata type of thing that will enable me to use this enclosure. It looks very good though.

eSATA is the external SATA drive standard. Faster than USB2 (though not a huge difference in real life, even with a 7200 rpm drive), but does not carry power, so you will need an external power supply.

You can buy an ExpressCard eSATA adapter, but they cost close to $100, so you might be better off returning the enclosure.

[bigtiger]

thanks, I will just return the enclosure then.

[tbessie]

But I'm using eSATA directly, from my eSATA Cardbus card on my A31 to a set of SATA-2 drive bays fronted by a SATA "Port Multiplier" (lets you plug one SATA cable from computer to drive tower to talk to all the drives at once). Theoretically, this setup can carry a lot more data at one time than Firewire 800, though bus speeds on my machines slow that down, I believe.

What kind of drive was this enclosure FOR? For SATA drives or PATA drives? If for SATA, it's mostly just a passthrough. If for PATA, it's doing translation between protocols.

Here's a good rundown, if you'd like to know. It definitely appears to be much faster than USB2 (and I've always had trouble and slowness with USB2 and Firewire drives under Windows than I have with the eSATA I'm using now; by the way, I buy my eSATA Cardbus cards at http://www.addonics.com -- good folks):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esata#External_SATA

- Tim

[tomh009]

Yes, eSATA is capable if 1.5-3.0 Gb/s, much faster than USB2's 480 Mb/s. However, for a typical laptop application -- a single 2.5" drive in an external housing -- the eSATA transfer rates don't have a big impact since the drives' media rates are in the 500-600 Mb/s range. And the disadvantage of external power requirement more often than not outweighs the small speed advantage in this scenario.

However, for the application you describe, with multiple (high-speed?) drives, possibly in a RAID array, eSATA is indeed a more appropriate solution.