eSATA External Storage Drive Reviewed

Tom's Hardware has a practical look at an eSATA drive offering from Taiwanese storage firm Thecus. From the article: "Thecus' N2050 is one of the first external twin-drive RAID boxes that uses eSATA. As expected, its performance was far better than what USB 2.0 offers. The end result is impressive. The date transfer rate of 30 MB/s that USB 2.0 offers does indeed pale in comparison to 100 MB/s for eSATA, while the WD1500 drives are capable of delivering even better performance in RAID 0. It is also good to see that Thecus did not throw the USB 2.0 interface away, because it is a nice backup interface whenyou want to use the device with other computers via USB 2.0."

Comments

Meant for whom?

[Jordan Catalano]

"Most users do one of two things when their PC runs out of hard disk space: they either add an additional drive or rely on external storage with a USB 2.0 or Firewire connection. However, both options have their disadvantages, since installing a new drive can be a cumbersome process, while external hard drives do not offer the same level of performance as that of directly attached Serial ATA (SATA) or UltraATA."

And why does the type of home user who shuns opening his or her case need mind-blowing performance? I just don't see who this product is for. There are already sollutions available for those concerned with either performance or ease-of-install.

Re:Meant for whom?

[jonnythan]

It's sure as heck nice to have both.

A lot of technically inclined people, myself included, use an external hard drive for backup purposes. It would be really nice to cut the time needed to perform a full backup in half.

Just because it's easy and portable doesn't make it for the non-techs only.

Re:Meant for whom?

[detritus`]

Those of us who dont happen to have any room left in the case for new HDs seems to be a potential use. Or as a a portable boot up device for those who have to use multiple machines. Or those who would rather buy an external device without sacrificing the speed of an internal device.

Re:Meant for whom?

[mtxf]

maybe some people might want performance and portability....

although ive found my usb2 hd is fast enough already, a few gigs can be transfered in under 60 seconds, do we really need anything that goes faster?

Re:Meant for whom?

[NapalmMan]

I could see this being useful if you, say, have no more room in your PC's case to add more drives, but still want good performance. I've managed to max out all the bays in older PCs before, and this seems like a fantastic solution for adding additional space.

Re:Meant for whom?

[ToxikFetus]

This could be beneficial for locales that deal with high-security information. Many offices cleared at a U.S. Secret level (or higher) must lock all classified materials in a safe at night. Therefore, USB/Firewire hard drives are used all over the place to store sensitive data. To be able to get SATA performance out of a relatively cheap external drive would be a boon for these offices.

Re:Meant for whom?

[ppz003]

External SATA drives will probably be as popular as external SCSI drives. They have their small/niche market, but the masses don't need/want them. The only real advantage I can see is if they can put these out for about the same cost as the internal drives, which they won't.

USB works well enough for most people and it will also support their cameras, printers, scanners, thumb drives, gamepads, cell phones, etc. The last time something better came out (firewire), USB was just updated to faster speeds. This is not to say that USB is always better then the alternatives, it's just much more versatile, and it works.

Re:Meant for whom?

[gid13]

I can see the portability, but when it comes to space in the case, it's really getting to the point that buying a cheap, not-very-powerful computer is going to be more cost-effective even than this, let alone the higher-end RAID NAS boxes, also from Thecus. The N4100, for instance, costs easily 3+ times what a Linux box with WAY more capability would.

Re:Meant for whom?

[Anonymous Coward]

And why does the type of home user who shuns opening his or her case need mind-blowing performance? I just don't see who this product is for. There are already sollutions available for those concerned with either performance or ease-of-install.

Why not have both? Sometimes you just want to add additional storage, don't have any more room in the case, and don't want to copy all your old files to a new disk.

Re:Meant for whom?

[TheRaven64]

Two words: Laptop users.

The internal 2.5" drives on most laptops are too small and too slow for video editing, so I have a pair of external FireWire 800 disks. These give me much better performance than the internal disk. eSATA will be a huge improvement because it gives me:

• About the same speed, and
• Doesn't have the ability to do daisy-chaining.

Umm, why are people trying to replace FW800 with eSATA again?

Re:Meant for whom?

[ImaLamer]

If the home user is able to (and does) buy USB HDTV Tuners then why can't he get a drive that is comfortable to move his backups to?

I feel comfortable opening my computer, but why should I? I like being able to plug in blocks of 250 or more Gigabytes. It is portable, but it is also damn easy and just as cheap as the other solutions. LaCie Porsche drives have dropped to around $125USD for 250 GB (USB only) where the EIDE drive, sans case is about $100USD. The cost seems worth it to me. The speed isn't as great, but I play thousands of songs and movies from them daily. Besides my power supply couldn't support five or six extra drives and the case wouldn't allow it of course.

Fast external storage is key. I sure would like to know my next HTPC has an outlet for faster external storage. I would also take comfort in buying a pre-built PC if it has this type of option.

re: Meant for whom?

[lax-goalie]

And why does the type of home user who shuns opening his or her case need mind-blowing performance?

And why do you assume that an user who requires an external drive is a "home user who shuns opening his or her case"? Poppycock.

Scenario 1: All the drive bays in your machine are full, and Firewire's too slow because you move big files around.

Scenario 2: The data on the drive needs to go somewhere else.

My desktop drive bays are full, but for me, I see this as a great replacement for backup tape drives, w/o having to sacrifice throughput. Assuming that the enclosure will fit in a safety deposit box, a couple of these could replace my current network backup hardware.

Re:Meant for whom?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Ignorance. This type of person might not know a knowledgable person, they might distrust the average geek and of course, upgrade services are pretty expensive. If you don't know how to do something and don't have that sort of talent, then it is an easy way to go. External drives can also be more easily moved between computers too, I use an external firewire cage as a backup such that I can manually disconnect and power off the drives when not in use.

Re:Meant for whom?

[Pleb'a.nz]

"Most users do one of two things when their PC runs out of hard disk space: they either add an additional drive or rely on external storage with a USB 2.0 or Firewire connection.... "

Most people just delete their porn. (seriously, dont mod me funny)

Re:Meant for whom?

[detritus`]

Its also getting to the point where some of those enclosures are getting down to a reasonable price (ie. firewire ones for 15$) and hopefully eSATA will as well, and the direct connection is still way faster than anything shared over network, even with Gbit networking its just not the same, trust me, i have an old machine sitting around for long term storage, but playing with multiple GB files over a network sucks, seriously.

Re:Meant for whom?

[UniverseIsADoughnut]

I've been trying to get such a setup going for a while, but in general, eSATA companies are awful. Firmtek has been an awful company, so I look forward to this. But sadly I can't find anyone who sells it.

Such a solution is great for a lot of people. Think digital photography types. We can produce insane amounts of data in no time (I took 30 gig of photos just this weekend on a trip). You can't keep up with internal storage. And for people like me who have a Powermac, you are limited to 2 internal drives. So a 8 port eSATA card plus units like this and away we go. The problem is vendors are few and far between. Prices are high, performance is not what it should be, and the companies are just plain bad to work with. But compared to other solutions, its great. Just the fact it has the potential to be fast enough to work with photos stored on the drive, unlike other solutions like FW or USB which are too slow.

If this company pans out and actually is selling this thing someplace and the price is right, I will have one on order. I wish it was made clear if this is doing some port multiplier inside or what since it only had 1 cable going to it.

Re:Meant for whom?

[Sylver Dragon]

There are areas which need this. I support GIS(Geospatial Information Systems) users. It's not uncommon for one of my users to need access to a 20GB raster image. Then they load a 100GB LIDAR raster on top of that. Which sounds fine, just put it on the SAN, and we're happy. Then they will ask for access to that data while in the field, with their laptop.
Sure, a USB drive works, but when you are talking about 100's of gigs of data, and everytime they pan around the map a chunk of it is going to be pulled off the drive again, speed makes a difference.
That said, this is the first I've really read about eSATA. I somehow expect thought that I will have a few users ask about it soon.

Re:Meant for whom?

[drsmithy]

And why does the type of home user who shuns opening his or her case need mind-blowing performance?

I don't shun opening my case, however, with 18 drives in it already it's physically incapable of holding any more - and I still have three 100Mhz, 64-bit PCI-X slots free.

More importantly, I'd prefer to pay $hundreds for some small, quiet, multi-drive eSATA enclosure than $thousands for a huge, noisy server chassis capable of holding more drives requiring the inconvenience and risk of relocating the internals of an entire machine.

Re:Meant for whom?

[Solder Fumes]

Just because it's easy and portable doesn't make it for the non-techs only.

In fact, that's what makes tech cheaper for us...it's the rest of the non-techs buying a new computer whenever theirs is "broken" from too much spyware, or needs a little more RAM. If everyone bought PC hardware only when needed and jealously guarded every CPU cycle, PCs would still be as expensive as they were 20 years ago.

Re:Meant for whom?

[paranoidhumanoid]

I do a lot of photoshop work with very large image files. I was using an external usb 2.0 drive for image storage and while it works, the external sata drive I'm using now works MUCH better.

Re: Meant for whom?

[xtracto]

I am in a kind of third category.

I have been looking for a RAID solution that can be plugged into my notebook. I would like to have a RAID 0 or RAID 0+1 (but It would be nice if I could get RAID 5) unit that I could plug into my system maybe using a PCMCIA RAID controller card (although I do not know if that is even possible).

It seems (doh, I just made a google and found a possible answer) that there are eSata PCMCIA adapters that do RAID 0,1.

Re:Meant for whom?

[MooUK]

And we wouldn't have this amazing source of just-out-of-date hardware for free, either.

Re:Meant for whom?

[couchslug]

Must...resist...aw, the heck with it.

"Therefore, USB/Firewire hard drives are used all over the place to store sensitive data."

For an overview of the external drive types in use, visit your local souk or bazaar. :P

Re:Meant for whom?

[Siffy]

Good question. I don't have mod points for ya, so... Maybe to force you to spend more money when you have to replace those drives or to increase future compatibility. Firewire really hasn't caught on as much as it should have. Perhaps standardizing as much as possible to SATA will be a good thing, as long as its performance continues to increase as a decent pace that keeps up with the target audience (everyone, including high-end tech geeks that might want 8 Raptors running RAID 5 for their FPS's).

Re: Meant for whom?

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you looked into Firewire external storage enclosures?
Firewire PC cards are common if your laptop doesn't have a port built in.

eSATA enclosures

[c_g_hills]

eSATA enclosures have been around for a while. The larger ones tend to have a port multiplier built in, which lets you use up to 5 drives with a single channel. This is the one I am after, but sadly the company will not ship to the UK.

http://www.cooldrives.com/mac-port-multiplier-sata -case.html

Re:eSATA enclosures

[stecoop]

This'll give you a warm fuzzy about buying one.
ALL ENCLOSURE SALES ARE FINAL. Due to the volume of uninformed purchases, enclosures can be returned FOR WARRANTY REPAIR ONLY (NO REFUNDS).

The drive costs 468.98 with a PCI-E controller. This seems like a pretty good deal if it has good raid performance. It is hard to buy a decent raid card, one that won't burden down the CPU, at that price plus a place to actually store 5 drives and the power connections with swap trays. I just wonder what is so uninforming?

Re:eSATA enclosures

[Anonymous Coward]

From personal experience, I would not purchase anything again from cooldrives or any of their many (probably more than 20) on-line companies (parent company is Quality Cables USA).

Check their return policy on stuff. It's usually no better than "it's yours after you buy it." If you do get an RMA issued, there are all kinds of hoops you'll have to jump through and they have all kinds of loopholes in their return policy as well.

Their product support is poor and their "customer reps" are just plain rude. They seem to believe that they are the only ones in the world that understand anything about computers. With their attitudes I dont know why they picked this business to be in.

Re:eSATA enclosures

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got my eye on the Sonnet Fusion 500P which will be available in the UK (soon I hope).

prize?

[e**(i pi)-1]

The esata drive is advertised to work on linux too. Did somebody find
a prize for a 1Terabyte version? Comparable to NAS?

Is it reliable?

[BigDogCH]

Much of what I have read says that eSata isn't as reliable as USB 2.0? Has anyone here used it? I have heard that it can be quite flakey. Anyone?

3x the speed is tempting, especially now that processer models only go up by 5% in performance (or less). I remember climbing a lot faster back in the 486 days, or even Pentium 1. WOW! Why can't our hardware increase like that any more? 30% increase per model #!

Re:Is it reliable?

[Flimzy]

The big boosts in CPU performance now come in the form of extra cores rather than extra "Mhz." The Athlon 2400+ to Athlon 64 x2 3200+ upgrade I made recently is quite comparable to the Pentium 75 to K6-166 Upgrade I made many years ago, even tho the "Mhz" of the chips are practically identical.

Re:Is it reliable?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to see 30%+ improvements between generations then do what I did and wait for 4-5 generations to pass before you upgrade. You get to upgrade everything else too. It is a real rush, baby!

(I went from a 133MHz Pentium to an AMD X2 3800+ and from a 2mb Diamond VLB Viper to an EVGA 256mb 7800GT. I saw some performance improvements.)

Re:Is it reliable?

[vux984]

According to Wikipedia

The Athlon XP 2400+ cpu was released in August 2002 and the Athlon 64 x2 3200+ was released in May 2005. (nearly 3 years, and easily half a dozen core revisions).

Contrast that with the Pentium 166 CPU which succeeded the Pentium 75 in one generation. (The "P54" was available in 75/90/100/120 MHz in releases staggered through '94 while its successor, the "P54C" was released staggered throughout the following year and was available at 133/150/166/200.

Even setting aside the Mhz myth, the chip makers do *seem* to be taking longer to make the same magnitude jumps in performance -- and this perception is certainly *greatly* magnified by the fact that the number of "step" products has increased vastly.

2GHz, 2.08GHz, 2.16GHz...yawn... :)

Once upon a time each new product would raise the bar another 10 - 20%... now we see a new product every 2-5% with 3 different cache sizes, and 3 different bus speed variations...or where there is no performance improvement (or perhaps its even slightly slower) but heat / power consumption has been reduced...

Re:Is it reliable?

[Dolda2000]

You're extremely unlikely to get any 3x speed improvement anyway. Sure, S-ATA may be able to sustain a much larger bandwidth than USB2 (although even then, 3 times USB2 seems very much... last I read, USB2 is clocked to 480 Mbps, i.e. 60 MBps), but to begin with, most hard drives can read no more than 60 MBps sustained.

Most importantly, however, during normal usage, most idle time to due hard drive latency isn't spent waiting for the hard drive to transfer the data off the platters, but waiting for the head arm to seek to the right cylinder. Seek time ain't going to be reduced just by switching to another bus interface.

Re:Is it reliable?

[NoMercy]

There shouln't be any reliability problems, eSATA's connector is of the same grade as USB and designed for external use, You would probably notice problems if you were using plain SATA connectors for external use after a while.

Re:Is it reliable?

[Dolda2000]

Most importantly, however, during normal usage, most idle time to due hard drive latency isn't spent waiting for the hard drive to transfer the data off the platters, but waiting for the head arm to seek to the right cylinder. Seek time ain't going to be reduced just by switching to another bus interface.

Sorry to be replying to my own post, but looking at THG's IOMeter benchmarks, my theory seems to be verifiable.

• File server scenario: eSATA performance is above USB2, but at most points only very slightly.
• Web server scenario: Performance of eSATA and USB2 is virtually identical.
• Database scenario: eSATA is slight better than USB2. Interestingly, though, RAID1 is a lot better than RAID0.
• Workstation scenario: Fluctuates greatly. At some points, eSATA even performs worse than USB2.

Re:Is it reliable?

[glitch23]

I'm not saying Intel and AMD are doing this on purpose or accident but when they increase the CPU clock rates by 50mhz or 100mhz for every new chip the # of mhz is constant but compared to the ever increasing total clock rate the percentage is always dropping which for the most part correlates with the performance you mention. With the same incremental increases back in the 486 days it easily was a lot more than 5% increase because the total clock speed back then was only around 50mhz (100mhz for those lucky enough to have a DX4).

Re:Is it reliable?

[rjstanford]

Database scenario: eSATA is slight better than USB2. Interestingly, though, RAID1 is a lot better than RAID0.

RAID1 is far faster than RAID0 for reads, because you can read from whichever disk has the least activity. Its a lot slower for writes, because you need to wait for the slowest disk to send a confirmation. Although for writes you can often use a middle ground where you wait for the first disk to hardware-confirm a write, and then move on. That way you're safe unless you get a machine crash and a HD crash at exactly the same time before the second disk completes its write. And hey, if that happens, your second disk is probably toast as well.

Re:Is it reliable?

[Flimzy]

The K6 is not comparable to a P54C. The K6 was MMX Capable, making it more comparable to a P55C, which was not released until a full 2 years after the P75. The Pentium 75 was released (according to Wikipedia) in Oct of 1994. The K6-166 was not released until April of 1997. Granted, in that day AMD was behind Intel... But even a direct Intel/Intel comparison (which would be a more accurate apples-to-apples comparison with my modern day AMD-AMD comparison) would still put a full 2-years between the CPU revisions.

eSATA drawbacks

[Ice Wewe]

eSATA seems to be the new buzz word in computing these days. The only problem is, that you're forced to use USB 2.0 or Ethernet to access the drive because very few motherboards are equipped with eSATA connectors. eSATA connectors have the same pins at the regular SATA connectors, but have different male and female connectors. Thus, although it may seem convient, if you really want to get full performence out of the drive, you'll have to buy one of the few motherboards that sports an eSATA port.

Also, mentioned in the article... the SATA bus boasts a wonderful 3Gb/s (or 300MB/s). This however, is not the bottle neck when it comes to performence. As the article mentions, the top SATA drives on the market today only get about 85MB/s read/write to the disk. So although you may get 300MB/s from the disk cache, and the controller, you'll never really get 300MB/s. Still, it's miles from Ultra-ATA.

Re:eSATA drawbacks

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Surprisingly, the eSATA connector doesn't need to be on the "motherboard". There are brackets that adapt the internal connectors to the card slot openings in the back. There are plenty of SATA and SATA RAID adapters with back port connectors for this very purpose so when you max out the internal bays, you can go external.

Re:eSATA drawbacks

[Kjella]

Or you can use the included eSATA card (yes, Thecus is aware most don't have that port). Furthermore, USB2/Firewire IS a bottleneck both in sustained and burst speed. And for video editing, notice that while the top speed is quite limited by the Thecus unit, the minimum sustained speed is very very close to an internal drive. I was considering getting one earlier but found a most unimpressive hard disk compatibility list and forum posts about incompatible drives. That made me go with a LaCie with disks already installed instead. Maybe next time...

Re:eSATA drawbacks

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly! My roommate just bought a Vantec Nexstar 3 drive enclosure, which supports eSATA as well as USB 2.0. Vantec included in the box an eSATA bracket, which (as I undertand it) covers an expansion slot in the back of your computer, with the ribbon connecting to an available SATA connector on the motherboard. It probably cost them pennies to include the adaptor in the box, but it's now got my roommate thinking about actually using the eSATA interface (unfortunately, they didn't include an eSATA cable).

Until eSATA is commonplace on motherboards, I think we can legitimately expect manufacturers of eSATA enclosures to ship the bracket as a cheap value-added perk.

Re:eSATA drawbacks

[Anonymous Coward]

> 3Gb/s (or 300MB/s). This however, is not the bottle neck when it comes to performence.

Of course it is when you have multiple drives on the same channel. An eSATA box I have from Thecus has two drives on a single channel and newer ones have many more than that. It's the same reason SCSI speeds have always led single drive speeds. You need much more bandwidth than a single drive uses. The bus (yes I know SATA isn't supposed to be a bus like standard IDE, but it is used as a bus more and more) should have 5 times or more of the bandwidth of any hard drive so that it isn't a bottleneck like older versions of SCSI were.

Re:eSATA drawbacks

[bobbutts]

3Gb/s is wrong
3Gb/s = 3 Gigabits per second = 384 MB/s = 384 MegaBytes per second
The spec is:
300 MB/s = 300 MegaBytes per second = 2.344 Gb/s = 2.344 Gigabits per second
Spec: http://www.sata-io.org/esata.asp
Calculator

Re:eSATA drawbacks

[timeOday]

What I hate about eSATA is that it's yet another bus/connector.

The great thing about USB is that it's compable with thousands of different devices. I don't want a different bus and connector for every different kind of device. I wish they could have just released a backwards compatible USB-3 instead of eSATA.

Re:eSATA drawbacks

[kinnunen]

No, it's 3Gbs with 8b/10b encoding.

10 bits are needed to transmit 1 byte of data, thus 3Gbs wire speed == 300MBs usable bandwidth.

Easy TiVo expansion

[pjcreath]

The upcoming (high def) TiVo Series 3 has an e-SATA port. Adding more recording space will be a whole lot easier than it was before, especially for the less adventurous folks.

Re:Easy TiVo expansion

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

Also, the Scientific Atlanta explorer 8300 also supports an ESATA port.

D-cinema needs this, for starters.

[adamgeek]

do we really need anything that goes faster?

As someone who works in the realm of digital cinema, I can state unequivocally that "we" (those of us working within the context of d-cinema) definitely do. In fact, I was in LA last week to preview a prototype uncompressedHD recorder that used e-sata based storage expansion. But back to the raw numbers-- even if you're just using e-sata as an archiving interface (which it would be very convenient for), you'll need to move your footage to the devices in as close to realtime as possible. A 2k frame (2048x1556) will run 12MB (approx).. x24 (frames per sec).. 288MB/second bandwidth needed for uncompressed 2k. So yes, we do need faster than USB2.

Does the average user need this? No. But, if the hardware of a blazingly fast interface could manage to be affordable (and thus suitable to become ubiquitous, unlike previous expensive interfaces.. fiber, etc), it would work just as well for the person backing up photos of their cats as the person moving uncompressed scans of 35mm motion picture film.

Clustering/Networking over SATA anyone?

[ex-geek]

Would it be possible to connect two computers via eSATA for the purpose of networking or clustering?

Re:Clustering/Networking over SATA anyone?

[HardCase]

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of them!

Re:Clustering/Networking over SATA anyone?

[Hal_Porter]

SATAn - SATA networking!

They could advertise it with pictures of the devil. Or a silhouette of a fat geek throwing the horns.

And the answer is No BTW. SATA is just a new transport for ATA/ATAPI commands. So it supports disk drives, CD roms and so on. It doesn't support network like devices. Firewire does though.

Review model had RAID built in

[SuperKendall]

Well the "first" for the review model was that it also had onboard RAID (0 or 1).

However if I'm going to have an external enclosure doing RAID, I really want to be able to swap out the drives easily - the reviewed enclosure had screws you needed to remove to take of fthe top, after which you had to remove the top drive to reach the bottom.

Your enclosure looked interesting, I had not heard of external SATA enclosures that did port multiplying - and it doesn't seem you loose any throughput for doing so.

whole article ruined on page 6 for me:

[sneezinglion]

From the article on page 6: "We were surprised that it is necessary to choose between RAID 0 and RAID 1. RAID 0 will increase performance considerably, but it will put your data at risk, since the data of both drives will be lost if only one fails. If RAID 1 is selected, data is mirrored onto both drives, but the net capacity is split in half. A just a bunch of drives (JBOD would be a suitable alternative, because it spans data across both drives. If one fails, the data on the second drive can be recovered." I am confused where they think the redundancy is on jbod?

Re:whole article ruined on page 6 for me:

[HardCase]

Gotta read it literally. No mention of redundancy. Of course, the missing (but, I guess, implied) extra sentence telling us that "only" half of our data would be gone wouldn't have killed them.

Re:whole article ruined on page 6 for me:

[imsabbel]

and you better hope that your partition tables and MFT is on the drive that DIDNT decide to die...

Re:whole article ruined on page 6 for me:

[CagedBear]

I am confused where they think the redundancy is on jbod?

Stripping and mirroring are two extremes, JBOD is the middle ground.
Important backups (email, taxes, checkbook, etc), which typically represents a small amount of HD space, you copy to both drives. It isn't ideal, but it's cheaper than cutting your HD space in half and works for the most part.

We don't need no stinkin' ports on the mobo...

[RareButSeriousSideEf]

PCI Express to the rescue...
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=esata+%22pci+e xpress

you're missing the point

[RelliK]

Also, mentioned in the article... the SATA bus boasts a wonderful 3Gb/s (or 300MB/s). This however, is not the bottle neck when it comes to performence. As the article mentions, the top SATA drives on the market today only get about 85MB/s read/write to the disk. So although you may get 300MB/s from the disk cache, and the controller, you'll never really get 300MB/s. Still, it's miles from Ultra-ATA.

It is true that a single drive cannot saturate the SATA channel. (85MB/s is actually a _very_ generous estimate. Typical performance is closer to 50-60MB/s). So, SATA certainly doesn't need more bandwidth in the near future. However, for eSATA, the extra bandwidth is _very_ useful. It would allow manufacturers to produce RAIDs with eSATA ports instead of SCSI or FC. (Right now, you still need a SCSI or FC card if you want to get any sort of performance). This would effectively commoditise the low-end RAID market, which is a very welcome development.

Re:you're missing the point

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes because FC is sooooo expensive... NOT!
Last time I checked FC Cards were around the same price as SCSI, the drives were cheaper (YMMV), and buses being serial, were much easier to route inside a case. And yes, SCSI-Ultra320 (much slower than FC) is much faster than SATA and still faster than eSATA.

Re:you're missing the point

[funkboy]

We've been doing this with FireWire on the Mac for the better part of a decade...

  -Blake

Re:you're missing the point

[Anonymous Coward]

Great, to bad Apple was unable to sell Firewire.

Re:you're missing the point

[Anonymous Coward]

so true, Firewire, IEEE 1394, and iLink never made to any apple desktops, never made it to any PCI cards, nor have they been adopted by any video cameras. in a perfect world a place like firewiredepot.com would have been created to sell all such fabled wares.

the real issue is that firewire 800 (1394b) was slow to be developed, ran into problems, and is relatively expensive per port vs usb (it's perceived competitor). The mythical firewire 1600 and 3200 were never made it out of the labs. If 1394b was introduced on it's original timetable, and 1394c was more than vaporware, then it would have been dominated by SATA.

USB2 made firewire400 seem unnecessary to most users. SATA debuted with a big splash while FW800 was expensive and problematic.

oh well

Honestly, I looked.

[HardCase]

Ok, I can't find it. Where is the price and availability information? I actually looked at all 12(!) pages of the ad-infested "review", but I didn't see it. Of course, by the time I got to the third page, I was nearly blind from looking at Tom's typically piss-poor page design, so it should be easy to understand if I missed it.

-d-

Re:Honestly, I looked.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Tom's typically piss-poor page design"

Yeah, if I see a link is to an article on Tom's, I don't click. Signal to noise ratio has gotten ridiculous.

Uninforming:The users not looking for information

[hackwrench]

User: I want an external drive, but I can't be bothered to find out the difference between USB, Firewire, and eSATA, or even that they exist. My system has a place to plug things into. That should be good enough, right?

Yet another review stating an incorrect fact

[this great guy]

Every single review of storage technologies I have read in the past 2 years state at least one (IMHO very important) incorrect fact. This is no exception with this one:

Page 2: "The fastest 3.5" SATA drives do not exceed 85 MB/s. A data transfer rate of 300 MB/s between a PC and a SATA drive cannot thus be matched by the speed of a SATA drive." Yes it can. When data is exchanged to/from the disk's cache, data throughput of 250+ MB/s can be achieved for a fraction of a second. Even if it's only for a fraction of a second, it is still important (else manufacturers would not even put cache memory on disks).

Re:Yet another review stating an incorrect fact

[Timothy Brownawell]

"When data is exchanged to/from the disk's cache, data throughput of 250+ MB/s can be achieved for a fraction of a second. Even if it's only for a fraction of a second, it is still important (else manufacturers would not even put cache memory on disks)."

No, it's not important. The on-disk cache isn't there for throughput, it's there because of the disk's rotational latency.

In order to increase throughput in a useful way, it would have to be larger than the OS's cache, which will be several 10's (or maybe a few 100's) of MB, depending on how much memory you have. The only reason it's useful at all is that the OS doesn't know the disk geometry and so *can't* do the type of caching the on-disk cache does (which is to store one "track" worth of data, so that an access that doesn't require moving the heads doesn't have to wait for the disk to rotate to the right position).

Re:Yet another review stating an incorrect fact

[this great guy]

<<
No, it's not important. The on-disk cache isn't there for throughput, it's there because of the disk's rotational latency.
>>

I am not speaking about sustained throughput, I am speaking about burst transfers. So in this regard, I maintain that yes, a 300 MB/s sata link will make a difference and will improve (some) workloads.

<<
the OS doesn't know the disk geometry and so *can't* do the type of caching the on-disk cache does.
>>

Modern OSes already know how to optimize the disks' heads movement. They can do it since LBA48 sector addresses are ordered from the inner cylinders to the outer cylinders. This allow Linux for example (I am familiar with its implementation) to use its block layer to reorder I/O requests in order to minimize disks' heads movement. In fact some kernel hackers even argue that NCQ won't bring such a major improvement because this block layer optimization is already very effective. You could even further argue that the OS can only do a better job than the on-disk cache, because it has a higher level view of what is happenning on the system: applications requiring better throughput, or better latency, etc, and can by consequent better tune the behavior of its I/O scheduler.

Re:Yet another review stating an incorrect fact

[Timothy Brownawell]

<<
No, it's not important. The on-disk cache isn't there for throughput, it's there because of the disk's rotational latency.
>>

I am not speaking about sustained throughput, I am speaking about burst transfers. So in this regard, I maintain that yes, a 300 MB/s sata link will make a difference and will improve (some) workloads.

How? With DMA the rest of the system doesn't have to sit around waiting for the transfer to finish, so why does it care about the burst rate for such a small amount of data?

Re:Yet another review stating an incorrect fact

[this great guy]

It is important in scenarios where a lot of small burst transfers happen almost all the time, like on a busy file server. In this case switching from 150 MB/s sata links to 300 MB/s ones will reduce the PCI/PCI-X/PCI-e bus utilization. Here is a realistic example: each 160 ms, a block of 8 MB of data needs to be sent to a sata disk, that means on average 6.25 blocks are sent per second (1000 / 160).

• If a 150 MB/s sata link is used, a practical 120+ MB/s burst data transfer rate can be achieved, which means the data block would be transferred in about 67 ms (8 / 120 * 1000). Since 6.25 blocks need to be sent per second, a total of 419 ms (67 * 6.25) is spent doing the transfer from RAM, over the PCI/PCI-X/PCI-e bus, over the sata link, and to the disk. The bus utilization is about 41.9 %.
• If a 300 MB/s sata link is used, a practical 240+ MB/s burst data transfer rate can be achieved, which means the data block would be transferred in about 33 ms (8 / 240 * 1000). Since 6.25 blocks need to be sent per second, a total of 206 ms (33 * 6.25) is spent doing the transfer from RAM, over the PCI/PCI-X/PCI-e bus, over the sata link, and to the disk. The bus utilization is about 20.6 %.

In this example, using 300 MB/s sata links reduced the PCI/PCI-X/PCI-e bus utilization from 41.9 % to 20.6 %. Which is important in case other devices need to use it (e.g. network cards in a file server, etc).

Please note that in the case of the slowest bus (PCI 32-bit 33 MHz), this example doesn't make sense because a 150 MB/s sata link (120 MB/s practical data throughput) already fully saturates the bus. The example remains valid for any other case (PCI 66 MHz, or PCI-X, or PCI-e).

Re:Yet another review stating an incorrect fact

[Timothy Brownawell]

smaller impedance mismatch between busses -> more efficient bus utilization

Ah. Now it makes sense.

hardware sites are lame

[Abtin]

pretty much every hardware site out there is lame.

where to start...

* they use a pair of 15k rpm drives in the box. the box has one dinky fan. if this was your actual setup, you would be able to boil water in the box. not good for the drives.

* they say something like "thank god esata is so much faster than usb 2.0. look at our pretty statics showing transfer rate is the bottleneck." nonsense. If you are using a pair of raid 0 $400 drives, and you defrag your drives every couple minutes, then yes transfer rate might be a bottleneck. However if you are someone that lives on planet earth, usb 2.0 will be more than sufficient.

I am not saying anything about the enclosure itself. it looks kind of useful. but toms is pretty much always full of shit.

Re:hardware sites are lame

[pxuongl]

USB 2.0 drives stink for anything but archiving data overnight. it's just so slow i can't stand it... not to mention that if you start to really get to the limits of the USB 2.0 bus, then stuff like your USB mouse starts getting jumpy. firewire 400 is the bare minimum for my work environment which involves heasy disk use. that way, i can keep disk operations and input decive traffic on separate buses.

Why do reviewer's speculate?

[daivzhavue]

From pg 5

It is interesting to note that Thecus uses a PCI Express slot to connect the drive cage to the controller PCB. If the device will one day become an NAS system , all Thecus has to do is exchange the controller board with the NAS version, which carries a network port instead of the eSATA connector.

Or MAYBE... they just used an off the shelf part to connect two boards together because the parts were cheap and didn't require any new fabrication. I have a docking station that uses an "AGP Slot" to connect two PCI slots plus some misc connections at a right angle to the main board. Do I think I can add remove the PCI Slots and actually install an AGP video card? C'mon people. Quit talking about things you have no idea about. Its articles like this that remind me why I don't read Tom's.

Re:Why do reviewer's speculate?

[Slashcrap]

C'mon people. Quit talking about things you have no idea about. Its articles like this that remind me why I don't read Tom's.

So you don't like people talking about things they know nothing about? But you still read Slashdot? I sense some double standards.

Umm, why eSATA, just use SATA

[Anubis333]

I have a PCMCIA SATA card on my laptop and get 85MB/sec on it. The PCMCIA card is basically an SATA adapter, then i plug in an external SATA HD. It completely blows away firewire; why do we need a new standard? Check out the cards here.

Re:Umm, why eSATA, just use SATA

[MBCook]

It's the same standard, basically. The problem is that the original SATA spec allowed for hot-plug and such (thus it could be used for external HDs) but it didn't specify the connector to be used for external SATA drives. A couple of 3rd party things sprang up (one just used the same connector, one used some other connector that looked like FireWire but had different pin outs, etc).

eSATA is just a standard for using SATA for external drives. It defines the connector, the cable, etc. This probably will replace FW for hard drives in a few years when computers start to include it. FW will still be around for scanners, cameras, and other things; but I expect that this will take over for HDs.

I would have liked to see how this compared to FW800.

Re:Umm, why eSATA, just use SATA

[Slashcrap]

I have a PCMCIA SATA card on my laptop and get 85MB/sec on it.

No you don't. You have a Cardbus or ExpressCard slot. PCMCIA runs at about the same speed as the old ISA bus, so getting 85MB/sec out of it is somewhat unlikely.

I've never heard of an SATA expansion card for laptops either, but I'll take your word for it.

Who Cares?

[MeBadMagic]

Who cares about the "date" transfer rate anyway. Doesn't take much to say today, or yesterday, even with a floppy!

Re:Who Cares?

[TeknoHog]

Who cares about the "date" transfer rate anyway.

Moreover, who on Slashdot has ever had a "date" to transfer?

eSATA could be great for notebooks

[Qwavel]

Most notebooks ship with smaller hard drives and don't allow you to open the case and add a second drive.

eSATA would allow you to connect an external drive at full speed and without the cpu usage of USB2.

All that is missing is eSATA connectors on notebooks, but I have seen Cardbus adapters for eSATA. Also, notebooks are now starting to apppear with SATA drives (eg. the new Dell XPS notebook) so hopefully they will add eSATA connectors soon.

To get it shipped outside the US...

[Col Bat Guano]

...try www.shopthestates.com. You get sent to them, they forward it on to you. I've used them and am very happy with their service.

Scientific Atlanta Cable DVR

[UttBuggly]

Well, I have a use for an external SATA drive...on the device in the subject line.

I bought a 250GB eSATA box for my DVR and it's performed perfectly. I have 410GB of storage for movies and time-shifting. (160GB on the cable box itself)

I paid about $150 plus shipping. :o)

Other sources for external SATA stuff

[Anonymous Coward]

No, certainly not the 'first' of its kind, I think cooldrives has had 2 listed for some time and I have seen others WITH internal RAID capabilities. Though I do think this unit has the smallest footprint.

Wiebetech has had 2 external raid sata units out for some time now, with hot swap drives. A SilverSATA line with up to 5 hotswap drives and a RAID 5, the RT5, which also comes with USB and firewire.

http://www.wiebetech.com/home.php

They will do direct international sales but I think they have european distribution.

Another good source of SATA and eSATA stuff is Addonics who also have UK distribution,

http://www.addonics.com/

Specically a custom configured unit,
http://www.addonics.com/products/raid_system/ast4. asp

They have the SATA->eSATA stuff you need to do any external configuration. Though I do not believe thier products do the RAID in the external enclosure.

There are also 'multilane' SATA cables/cards allow you to connect up to 4 SATA drives over a single cable. The drives can then be configured using a RAID array based on the controller in the PC.

Power brick? ugh..

[yem]

What a pity they couldn't engineer a power rail into the eSATA spec.

No.

[DrYak]

To be able to do IP over a bus, this bus must accept multiple "hosts" (multiple controllers on the same bus).
Usually, if a bus can accept multiple PCs, or even no PC at all, it's a good sign. If a bus is a 1PC + Multiple Peripheral topology, you're sure i'll probably NOT support IP.

Able to do IP :

• FireWire : can do IP. A FireWire bus can support multiple hosts or no hosts at all.
• SCSI : can do IP. The bus it self is just a bunch of numbered SCSI device talking to each other. So IP is possible as long drivers for controller can do both HOST (controller talks to other targets - your normal everyday controller mode) and TARGET mode (controller can accept input from other hosts - like normal SCSI devices like CD-Roms, etc... do). There are some patch on the internet.
• Bluetooth : Are devices are equal (no host/target distinction). IP is possible as long as each device advertises some Bluetooth Network Profile.

Unable to do IP :

• usb : only a single host that manage devices connected to it. (In PC-2-PC usb connection cable, this is circumvented by having each side see a USB device advertised as a "USB Network device". But the two busses aren't interconnected - Also some device like PDA and Photo camera can switch between being an USB peripheral, when connected to a PC. or a USB host, when connected to a printer) That's also why I don't like it as much as FireWire.
• SATA, ATA, etc. : 1 host controlling 1 or more peripherals. Can't do IP per se. Could be circumvented like USB (although nobody is doing "ATA Network devices" anymore sinces the old days of 16bit PCMCIA and CompactFlash network adapters)
• MIDI, i2c, etc. : can have multiple device talking to each other (see MIDIMaze), but bus speed makes them unusable

Been there, done better

[billcopc]

eSATA is cute and all, but nothing's ever stopped me from routing regular SATA cables out the back of the case, to a nice external hot-swap drive tower. Many higher-end motherboards even come with a little bracket for external SATA ports. While I understand that eSATA is somewhat improved for signal integrity and ease of use (grippy connectors), it doesn't seem like such a big deal to me. I haven't seen a single motherboard with eSATA yet, though some "platinum edition" boards do have a true SATA jack on the backplane. If you want both simplicity and speed. For idiot-proof simplicity there's the ubiquitous USB. For speed there's the real SATA. Is there really anything in between that needs eSATA at all ?

Re:Been there, done better

[NinjaNoh]

While It is possable to run a SATA outside the case, I wouldn't reccomend it. There is a higer chance of signal loss, interference, and distruction of hardware. The cables are not built like USB, PS2, ect. There isn't a Shielding wire surrounding the cable, protecting the soft insides from outside signal "noise"... something that your PC case is slightly good at. Plus the cables are built with the mind set, as you place them once and never touch them again. The plugs are not elbowed, and the coating is thin.

Re:Been there, done better

[billcopc]

Yes, the cables that come with the average cheap board are fragile and hell to work with, but you can get much better quality cables from 3rd parties that offer 90-degree connectors that actually aren't made of cheap bendy plastic. For the signal corruption, well maybe I'm just lucky but I've been running this external raid rack pretty hard every day, for the past year. Retransmits are in the low tens, power-on hours in the eight-thousand range.. No data loss yet and it runs crazy fast. I think I'm safe.

ASUS eSATA Support (was Re: eSATA drawbacks)

[quarkscat]

This looks like a product I an just going to have to try out - the relatively new
ASUS Model A8N-SLI Premium retail motherboard kit not only includes SATA
RAID on the motherboard, it also has an external eSATA (2 channel) breakout
via a slot cover.

Imagine two of these external SATA RAID boxes tied together in a 10 disk
RAID 10 (RAID 5 + 0) configuration, and using XFS or Reister FS ...

Hardly new, or newsworthy

[Anonymous Coward]

Please. 'First eSATA case'! I've been using a 4x250gb eSATA raid5 solution for 6 months now. This is hardly new.